Wing Area

Get your science fledglings to spread their wings with this learning exercise. After teaching them about the scientific process, give them two real-life scenarios to think critically through: Fleming's experimentation with penicillin and...

Explore the powers of ten while examining a Blue Morpho butterfly wing. Learners discover there is a lot more than meets the eye when one looks close enough.

Students investigate the force of drag and how NASA engineers use models and glowing paints to examine how air flows over vehicles in a wind tunnel. They discover how the blended wing body will affect air travelers of the future.

Learners examine the aerodynamics of a wing and how it generates lift.  In this flight lesson students complete several experiments including how to build a paper plane and how airfoils affect performance.

Students read an explanation from a NASA Web-based textbook on lift and an explanation on the FoilSim software package given below. They use FoilSim to evaluate the relationship between wing area and lift.

Students use FoilSim to complete the activity and investigate the factors that affect lift and how wing area and lift are related.

How are raptors and airplanes alike? Combine science and language arts in this fun and interactive project. Young scientists research the animal in order to design their own aircraft, and compete in a contest for farthest, fastest, and...

Students use FoilSim to design an airplane wing that generates a given lift. As they change parameters such as airspeed, altitude, angle of attack, thickness and curvature of the airfoil, and size of the wing area, the software...

Young scholars use FoilSim to demonstrate that the graphic analysis of the airflow around one object can be used to hypothesize airflow graphs for objects as they are elongated from a sphere to an airfoil shape.

Students, after designing model wings, demonstrate an understanding of wing design by testing models of the wing types both experimentally and by computer modeling in FoilSim and then presenting their results.