HOW FAR WILL IT FLY? BUILD & TEST PAPER PLANES WITH DIFFERENT BE AN AEROSPACE ENGINEER

Intro: Just one sheet of paper can lead to a Materials: Vocabulary: whole lot of fun. How? Paper planes! All you  Paper (3 sheets)  Metric force have to know is how to fold and you can have a  Metric ruler  Thrust simple plane in a matter of minutes! But what  Masking tape (1 roll).  design should you use to build the best plane? In Alternatively, if you are testing  Drag this science project, you will this project outside, you can  Weight change the basic design of a paper plane and use sticks or rocks.  Gravity see how this affects its . Specifically, you  Tape measure  Data will increase how much drag the plane  Scissors  Vertical experiences and see if this changes how far the  Lab notebook  Accurate paper plane flies. There is a lot of cool science in this project, such as how the  Wind tunnel different forces allow a plane to fly, so get ready  Computer simulation to start folding!  Turbulence  Streamlines Determine whether the distance a Objective: paper plane flies is affected by increasing how much drag it experiences. Procedure: Questions  What is drag and how 1. Fold a piece of paper into the basic dart paper plane following the instructions. does it affect airplane Repeat two more times so that you have a total of three paper planes. They should flight? all look identical.  How do you think you 2. Make a data table in your lab could change how much notebook, like Table shown, drag a paper plane has? where you can record the data  What provides thrust to you get from your experiment. a real airplane? For each flight, write down how  How does folding wings far the paper plane travels (in increase or decrease centimeters [cm] or meters [m]). drag? 3. Tear off a 5-foot-long piece of masking tape and tape it to the ground in front of you, going from left to right. This will be the starting line from which you will fly the paper planes. If you are doing this science project outside, you could use a line of sticks or rocks to mark the starting point. Make sure you have a large area to fly your paper airplane. 4. Practice throwing or launching the paper planes. Launch the planes in exactly the same way every time. Hold the planes at exactly the same spot on the plane every time you launch a plane. Place your toe on the starting line you prepared earlier and then throw one of your planes. 5. Use the tape measure to measure how far (in centimeters or meters) the paper Simulation: Download & Use plane flew from the starting line. Record this distance in the data table in your lab Flow Design to test by notebook. Repeat for each plane. downloading the 3D design for 6. Once you have flown a plane five times, change the plane to increase its drag. regular airplanes and flap Look at the back of the plane, where the wings meet the ridge in the middle. Using airplanes. Familiarize yourself scissors, cut slits that are 2.5 cm long right where either wing meets the middle with Autodesk Flow Design. ridge. Fold up the 2.5 cm cut section on both wings so that these sections are at about a 90-degree angle from the rest of the wing, as shown in Figure 2 below. 7. Create a graph of your data. What does your graph tell you? How did adding drag to your paper planes affect how far they flew? Can you explain your results in terms of how forces allow a plane to fly?

Marcella Park – Elementary STEM Specialist

Pamela Nagurka- Secondary STEM Specialist