How strong is an egg?

We discussed how fragile eggs are. To test our theory, we took half egg shells, turned them so that the ends were pointed upwards. Then we began piling books on the egg shells. Each student was asked to predict how many books the 4 egg shells would hold.

We continued to pile books on, listening for the crack of the egg shell each time.  We kept track of how many books by recording with tally marks. 

We discovered that these eggshells that we thought were so fragile were able to hold a whopping 37 books before one of the egg shells began to crack!!!

At project time, many of the students continued to investigate this experiment on their own.

Eventually, someone got the idea to use blocks instead of books as a weight. 

Even then, the eggshells were able to support 12 blocks on top! Maybe eggs aren't so fragile after all!