Egg Parachute — Bringing Tomorrow’s Entrepreneurs Out Of Their Shell

It was Tuesday afternoon, around 13.30 and I found myself in a school playground with egg all over my hands — which was bad news for the four year 9’s whose egg launcher, it would seem, had failed to launch their egg safely. We had been running an enterprise skills development day at a local secondary school and one of the best games I know for this is egg parachute.

It’s a simple game — the young people are put in to groups and then are challenged (unofficially by the UK Space Agency) to design, purchase, construct, market and then test a satellite (egg) launcher. All cracking stuff and I have used it with young and old people from all sorts of different backgrounds and always found it to be pretty successful at encouraging people’s entrepreneurial sides to emerge.

It is usually at the post launching stage where people involved begin to ask why — staff and volunteers included…Why is their egg all over my classroom? (Teacher) Why are we doing this — I won’t need to launch an egg when I’m older?! (Slightly objectionable pupil) Why did I agree to help out with this? (Rather patient volunteer). It is at this point that for me, as the ‘enterprise eggspert’ for the day, that the real value of the game emerges.

The point of egg parachute is to learn to think about the value of what you are doing and place it in different contexts (out of the frying pan and in to the fire maybe…). Yes, the game does take people through a standard product creation process, from idea to implementation, but it also brings them out of their shells as well. In the best cases groups see past the absurdity (awesomeness) of the egg launching and begin to explore how this process can be applied to other environments and scenarios. In my mind this is them re-learning the value of ‘why?’

As I reflected on the different environments I have used egg parachute in I began to see a pattern to the why’s — it was clear that the best egg launchers were made by teenagers, but the best egg launchers themselves tend be much younger pupils. They are more inclined to use their why as a gateway to the next why; rather than as a roadblock and point of objection. A point which is probably paralleled by the patience and acceptance of whys by authorities (parents/teachers/councils…) as people grow up. Maybe.

The ability to crack on and ask an open-minded why is a hugely valuable skill and one which I think is important to the growth of entrepreneurs, innovators and individuals. This is probably why I think egg parachute is a great to develop entrepreneurial mind-sets and therefore will continue to play it with groups wherever and whenever I can. Although possibly it will all end with egg on my face…