Chants of “firetruck! firetruck!” greeted one of Redmond Fire Department’s fire crews as they pulled around the back side of Albert Einstein Elementary School on Tuesday afternoon for the annual egg drop contest.

The egg drop has been a school tradition for the K-5 students for around the last eight years, with Alissa MacDonald and Ingrid Munck coordinating much of the activities over the past five years.

“It’s creative, they get to think of something out of the box,” MacDonald said.

The egg drop revolves around the roughly 150 students who participated building packages to hold a raw egg inside.

The point is to keep the egg from breaking in the package after it’s dropped from around 60 feet up from the bucket of the firetruck.

“It’s very competitive, the kids love the competition,” Munck said. “It just givers them an opportunity to express their ingenuity.”

A colorful array of contraptions were separated into boxes by grade. Designs ranged from bundles of plastic straws taped together, to a Ziploc bag full of popcorn to a Batman pinata filled with jello.

As the first two grades’ boxes were taken up the firetruck bucket, the kids started chanting “drop the egg!”

A staff member from the school went up with a firefighter and began tossing the contraptions over by grade.

Some seemed to hold up well, while others hit the ground with an audible splat.

After each grade’s eggs were dropped, the students ran over to see how their eggs fared.

The drop also comes during the last week of school, and MacDonald said it’s a good send-off for the students.

“It’s just a really fun thing to do at the end of the year,” she said.

Both MacDonald and Munck’s kids are graduating out of the school this year, so they said the mantle will be passed on to other organizers.