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A program called, “Mission Eggscellence” is an innovative way of using automotive design technology to teach Mississippi grade school students math and physics. Drs. Mark Horstemeyer and Donald Trotter of the Center for Advanced Vehicular Systems (CAVS) at Mississippi State University designed the program. They created Mission Eggscellence to help make learning math and science fun for children in elementary school. 

The initial introductions of the program were so successful that CAVS hired Rosemary Cuicchi, a teacher at Armstrong Middle School in Starkville, Mississippi, to market the program to local schools as an outreach project. With her help and the support of CAVS, the students in first through sixth grades designed model cars with adaptable bumpers to measure impact intensities in a variety of crash scenarios. They also experimented with different car restraint designs using no bumpers to test restraint efficiency and observe the forces acting upon the passenger (in this case a raw egg).

The popularity of the program grew so quickly that additional teachers were needed to implement the program.  Last fall kindergarten through sixth grade teachers from Choctaw, Clay, Lowndes, Oktibbeha, Webster, and Winston counties participated in a training workshop where they learned how to demonstrate how math and physics are associated with car crashes.  The experiments demonstrate speed, velocity, acceleration, force, conservation of momentum, impulse and mechanical energy.  The advantages the program provides are two-fold; it is a fun way for students to learn math and science and they correspond with the Mississippi educational curriculum standards.

To help these educators generate more interest in math and science among grade school students the Bagley College of Engineering gave each teacher attending the workshop a materials kit to conduct experiments for a class size of up to 30 students.  The experimental kit included: a Newton’s cradle, massive car, ramp, 15 bumpers, 15 K’nex kits (model car parts and lesson plan for passenger restraint test), digital scale, a manual and Car Crash Physics DVD, and a custom designed PowerPoint presentation explaining the concepts of math and physics for each appropriate age group.

After three years of working with grade school students, CAVS noticed a rivalry was building between the schools on who could build the most structurally sound and safest car.   Voila, CAVS sponsored a “Mission Eggcellence” competition. The event included a bumper and a K’nex competition.  In each challenge the teams, which consisted of one to three students, had to build what they felt were the most structurally sound and proved to have the best effective safety applications for their respective cars.  The bumper competition focused on the safety from an outside perspective in order to deflect foreign objects from hitting a car.  The K’nex competition focused on the inside safety restraints.  A student team’s car advanced to the next round by its ability to keep the passenger safely intact through each impact as the car was launched from ramps with different inclines. 

A total of 19 teams consisting of 27 students competed in the Eggcellence Competition. The X-Challenge team from MSU, as well as CAVS personnel Dr. Paul Cuicchi, Julie McAlpin, Heather Oliveri, and Amanda McAlpin helped coordinate and run the event.

Some exciting prospects for the future include the addition of a seventh through 12th-grade teacher workshop; and with strong interest CAVS plans to hold competitions for junior and high school students in the winter of 2008.  In addition, workshops and competitions are scheduled to become available state wide in the coming year.