✈️ Paper airplane wing shapes: the whole packet

✈️ Paper airplane wing shapes · 3rd–8th grade · 1 day of testing · free · 60 minutes a sitting

My days, if the fair is 14 days away

Count back from your fair day and write in each date. Fewer days than this? The jobs share days, in this order; nothing is skipped.

Dates from my teacher

• My question is due
• Testing starts
• My results table and graph are due
• My board is due

In this packet

1. 🗓️ My project plan
2. 💭 My hypothesis
3. 🧺 Change, measure, keep the same
4. 🪜 My steps
5. 📊 My results
6. 📓 My logbook
7. ✅ My conclusion
8. ✂️ Board titles to cut out
9. 🏅 The judge's questions and my certificate

If I change the shape of the wings, then how far the plane flies will ________________, because _____________________________________________

What I think will happen, in my own words:

3 levels × 3 tries at each = 9 tries in all. If anything you keep the same changes, you won't know which change made the difference.

What I need

• 📄 Paper: 3 sheets, all the same
• 🩹 Masking tape, to mark lines
• 📏 A tape measure, or a long ruler

Be safe: ✅ Nothing sharp, hot or small

1. Fold three planes from the same paper: a narrow dart, a wide glider and one with long straight wings.
2. Put a strip of masking tape on the floor as your throwing line.
3. Stand behind the line and throw the dart gently and level.
4. Measure from the line to where its nose first touched the floor.
5. Write it in your table, then throw it twice more.
6. Throw the glider three times and the long-wing plane three times.
7. Find the middle distance for each plane.
8. Draw a bar graph with one bar for each wing shape.

Write each number in your results table the moment you measure it.

I changed: Wing shape   I measured: how far the plane flies (cm)

MY GRAPH (a bar graph: wing shape along the bottom, cm up the side)

What I noticed: ______________________________________________

Write something every day you work on it, even the days you only gather things. More days? The three-page logbook prints from peabody.kids/science-fair/templates/logbook.

My hypothesis was ☐ right ☐ partly right ☐ not right.

I know because my numbers show:

What surprised me, or what might have gone wrong (7th and up):

Next time I would test:

Idea: Change a second thing: add one paper clip to the nose of each plane, and see whether the best wing shape changes.

1. What made you want to ask this question? Say something like: I wanted to know: which wing shape flies farthest?
2. What did you think would happen, and why? Say something like: I thought changing the shape of the wings would change how far the plane flies, and I wrote down why.
3. What did you change, and what did you measure? Say something like: I changed the shape of the wings (Narrow dart, Wide glider, Long straight wings) and measured how far the plane flies in cm.
4. What did you keep the same, and why does that matter? Say something like: I kept the same kind of paper and the same gentle, level throw from the same line the same, so only the shape of the wings was different.
5. How many times did you test it? Say something like: 3 times at each of my 3 levels, and I found the middle number.
6. What did you find out? Show me in your numbers. Say something like: Look at my table: Narrow dart and Long straight wings gave different numbers, and here's the pattern.
7. Was your hypothesis right? How do you know? Say something like: My numbers show whether I was right, partly right or not, and I can show you where.
8. Did anything go wrong, or surprise you? Say something like: One try was odd, so I did it again and wrote it in my logbook.
9. If you did it again, what would you change or test next? Say something like: I'd change a second thing: add one paper clip to the nose of each plane, and see whether the best wing shape changes.