ENGINEERING FOR THE
ENVIRONMENT BY KRISTEN WALSH PHOTOS BY LILLIE PAQUETTE
D the GAzette
10
esiree Plata ’99 helps her son, 6, and daughter, 4, climb onto the flat rooftop of her garage. (Her threemonth-old son stays inside with her husband.) It’s Earth Day, and the MIT professor couldn’t let the day go by without a science experiment. Her kids are nearly jumping up and down as they wait for her to help them toss the homemade egg launchers they built as part of the “egg drop challenge.” The popular STEM activity includes constructing an egg launcher using materials (typically recyclables) to protect a raw egg from breaking when dropped from a set height.
“Once I told my kids that I failed miserably at my first egg drop challenge at Gould—I basically threw an egg out of the third floor window of Hanscom Hall—they were determined to beat me,” says Plata, who is now the Gilbert W. Winslow (1937) Career Development Professor in Civil Engineering at MIT. “The great thing about this kind of open challenge is that they got to think about the design principles to protect the egg using the materials right in front of them. They were so excited to see if the eggs were intact.” (They were, and Mom was impressed.)
