STEM Challenge Egg Cars featuring Newton’s 2nd Law

It’s another fabulous STEM activity using Newton’s Laws of Motion! Students will love this egg car challenge and experimenting with their egg cars and ramps! You will love the 9-page Teacher's Guide and Bonus Lesson!

Note: This challenge is available in a money-saving bundle!

• STEM Challenge Bundle featuring Newton’s Laws of Motion
• STEM Challenges 6 Pack Bundle featuring Newton's Laws of Motion

What is the challenge?

• In this challenge, students will use materials to design and create a vehicle. The vehicle must transport cargo down a ramp in the fastest and safest way possible.
• The students will need to plan the best way to overcome friction and maintain enough speed to make it down the ramp.
• In addition, the vehicle will have to be stable enough to transport the precious cargo without damaging it. The cargo just happens to be an egg!
• Students will work using a budget. Students must “purchase” materials to use and stay within a set spending amount.
• This project was tested with third graders and is suggested for grades 3-5.
• You will need supplies in addition to this package. This includes craft sticks, straws, cardboard pieces, cardboard tubes, Masking tape, wooden skewers, round objects for wheels, plastic and real eggs, pipe cleaners, rubber bands, paper clips, and binder clips, weights (like pennies) for the eggs, and a ramp. The ramp can be a long piece of cardboard or foam board. Side “rails” are optional but helpful!

The package specifically includes:

• Teacher background
• Materials and preparation page
• 5 pages of teacher directions
• Constraints list
• A special page of information about Newton’s Laws of Motion
• 4 pages of photographs
• Student lab sheet
• Two versions of the Cost and Planning sheet
• An editable Cost and Planning sheet
• Bonus Lesson idea about using small die-cast cars and track to demonstrate the laws of motion
• Scoring rubric
• Terms of Use page.
• All forms are editable!
• Student answer sheets are not included, but samples from student work are included in the teacher direction pages.
• The page count listed for this package includes everything.

This challenge will need 2 class sessions to complete.

This challenge works perfectly with these two:

• Build a Bottle Car
• Build a Newton’s Cradle

All three Newton challenges are available in money-saving bundles!

• STEM Challenge Bundle featuring Newton’s Laws of Motion
• STEM Challenges 6 Pack Bundle featuring Newton's Laws of Motion

NEWTON'S LAWS

The simplified version of the second law of motion is: the greater the mass of an object, the more force it will take to accelerate that object. So, the farther you want something to go, the harder you must throw it or kick it. Also, the heavier something is, the harder it is to move it. An object with more mass must have even more force applied.

So How Does This Apply to Egg Cars?

According to the 2nd law, the heavier something is the harder it is to move it. We used the ramps to create the force to propel our cars. A steeper ramp should have given us more force to make the car travel farther even when it was heavier. A bonus lesson with our ramps was understanding that the forward motion of the car did cause the top-heaviness and the ejecting of the egg.

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You might also like these STEM events about Force and Motion:

• Balloon Rockets
• Balloon Carousels
• Building Ramps
• Force and Motion Boom Cards

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