They’ve nicknamed their contraptions egg balls, huevos duros, egg bombs and egg jojos, but to a class of landscape architecture students, today’s Egg Drop from the heights of the university’s EITC atrium will hopefully turn out to be anything but scrambled.

As part of an assignment using the seven phases of the design process, students have built a variety of prototypes, each designed to prevent a raw chicken egg from breaking after being dropped from several metres above in a day-long testing session today on campus. Prof. Dietmar Straub explains the egg drop is a way his students can get hands-on experience in a theoretical course in design and history.

“At the same time, it’s show time,” he adds. “This is what I am calling a ‘fun _ ctional’ object. The design and the choreography should be able to entertain the audience. I tried to engage the students to take a risk.

“The event is located in the engineering building because of the very spectacular vertical from the atrium bridges, or ‘runways’. The eggs should drop, fall, roll, swim down 6 or 8 m. But are they able to survive?”

What:              Egg Drop: 14 designs for a fun_ctional problem
Where:            Atrium of the Engineering and Information Technology Complex (EITC), University of Manitoba
When:             Today, Wednesday, March 18, 2009
Times:             From 9:30 a.m. to 1:00 p.m.

For more information contact: Prof. Dietmar Straub, department of landscape architecture, Faculty of Architecture, University of Manitoba at (204) 474 6116.