Who's Flying This Thing?

Aspiring aeronautical engineers demonstrate different forces as they construct and test paper airplanes. This lesson plan links you to a website that models the most effective paper airplane design, an animation describing the forces...

Adorable little stick figures push and pull a cart of blocks to explain the push and pull of forces. Future physicists then define force and identify it in different situations on the worksheet that follows. Concepts covered include...

Get the class up and going with a lesson that discusses how airplane wings provide lift. Pupils use their knowledge of Bernoulli's Principle to develop an explanation of how it creates lift on airplane wings.

Do not let friction drag you down! The 11th segment in a series of 22 focuses on the fourth force acting upon an airplane—drag. Pupils learn about the effects and causes of drag.

Too much material will weigh you down. The sixth segment in a series of 22 highlights how weight affects a plane. Pupils learn that engineers take the properties of materials, including weight, when designing something. 

Students design a skydiver and parachute constraption to demonstrate how drag caused by air resistance slows the descent of skydivers as they travel back to Earth. They experience how gravity pulls the skydiver toward the earth and how...

Students design and test paper airplanes to understand the concept of lift and how it affects flight. This technology-based Science activity is excellent for use with upper-elementary and middle-level learners and uses spreadsheet...

Stop and drop what is in your hand! Pupils investigate how form effects drag in the 12th part of a 22-part unit on aviation. Groups create equally weighted objects and determine which one falls the fastest by collecting data.

An introduction to thrust and how it relates to airplanes, told in an animated format.

Through this series of three lessons, students will gain an understanding of the basics of flight. They will learn about the four forces of flight and practice their observation skills through a number of fun experiments. In addition,...