Easy Egg-ceptional Experiments

There are lots of easy and fun science experiments that you can do involving eggs. Even younger kids will get a kick out of some of them, although they won't understand the "science" behind the trick. Here's a few we've come up with.

Egg Etching

Most children decorate eggs for Easter, but here's a way to get in a little science experiment with your decorating. Is it possible to actually etch an egg without breaking it? We have found the answer.

What You'll Need:

• Hard Boiled Egg
• Crayons
• Widemouth Jar
• White Vinegar

What to Do:

1. Draw on your egg with the crayons. You create designs, write words, or even just scribble. The color of the crayons doesn't matter. Be very careful not to crack the egg when you are writing on it.

2. Put the egg into the widemouth jar and cover it with white vinegar.

3. Let the egg stand in the vinegar for two hours and then pour out the vinegar and replace it with fresh vinegar.

4. Let the egg stand in the fresh vinegar for another two hours, then take it out of the jar. Wash the egg and remove all the crayon markes. This will create an etched egg shell.

Why This Works

The crayon acts as a protective barrier to the vinegar. The acid in the vinegar dissolves much of the calcium carbonate of the eggshell. The wax in the crayons protects the parts of the shell that you wrote on and keeps it from dissolving.

NOTE: Sorry about the less than optimal picture for this experiment. I tried to photograph the eggs that we created, but the camera wouldn't pick up the etching well enough to show them here. Hopefully the drawing here will give you an idea what to expect.

Which One Is Cooked?

What You'll Need:

• 1 Hard Boiled Egg (cooled to the same temperature at the raw eggs)
• 2 Raw Eggs

The Experiment

Present the child with the eggs and ask them to tell you which one is the hard boiled egg and which ones are the raw eggs without breaking them. Let them examine the eggs until they either make a guess or give up, and then tell them that there is a secret method to detecting the cooked egg.

Lay each egg down on a flat surface and spin them long ways like a top. Try to get them all spinning at the same time if you can, then ask the child which one is different.

The two raw eggs wobble. The hard boiled egg spins.

Touch each of the eggs lightly as it's spinning.

The two raw eggs will start moving again after you've tried to stop them, but the hard boiled egg will stop spinning completely when you touch it.

The Explanation

When you spin the two raw eggs, the yolks and whites are also moving inside the eggshell. The inertia of spinning causes the inside of the egg to move at a different rate than the outside of the egg because it's mass is different. That's why they wobble and still move even after you've tried to stop them.

The hard boiled egg doesn't wobble because cooking the egg has made the inside of the egg solid and less affected by the enertia. The solid inside of the egg is also closer in mass to the shell, which allows it to spin more smoothly and respond to stopping more quickly.