Up, up and away continued

Date: 27th Jan 2022 @ 9:47am

We continued our Design Technology project by looking at how aeroplanes fly and how important wings are. By blowing on strips of paper, we realised that fast air blown over the top of the paper makes the strip go up (not down as we expected!). This helps to explain how the wings work on an aeroplane; with the air moving faster over the top than the bottom, lift is created. We experimented with 2 different paper planes to see which would fly the best. One plane had some air blocking 'flaps' at the top. After a lot of fun, we discovered that the planes with the flaps did not fly very well because the fast air was being blocked from moving over the wing. One of the children recognised that the flaps on a real aeroplane help to slow it down when it lands! We are fast becoming experts on aerodynamics!