Physics of Paper Airplanes
Our Project and Evidence of Work
For this AP Physics project, my team and I had to choose one subject matter to study and experiment with in order to further understand the physics behind it. We chose paper airplanes as our subject to study for the project. We found the best prototype by testing how far each of 6 paper airplane prototypes fle, and chose the top airplane to add modifications to. We then added 4 modifications to it individually to the control plane and then also tested a plane with all four of the modifications. All of the mods ended up helping the plane to go farther. We analyzed the plane before and after all of the modifications. We found values for the velocity, force of lift, force of drag, and force of throw on the planes in order to compare the two models.
We came to the conclusion that the plane with all of the modifications flew the farthest out of any plane that we tested, so it is the best plane in terms of distance traveled.
Content
Velocity- The speed at which an object is moving. We analyzed the average velocities from the first couple meters and the last couple meters in order to find the change in velocity of the plane throughout its flight.
Acceleration- The speed at which an object moves over time. We used the velocities we found from the videos of the airplanes to calculate the deceleration.
Free Fall- Downward movement of an object due to gravity only. We calculated the free fall values of the planes using the mass of the plane.
Forces- an influence that causes the motion of an object with mass to change. We calculated a lot of forces in this project, including the force of drag, the force of lift, and the force of throw on the paper airplane.
Air Resistance/Friction- The amount of friction an object experiences due to surface area contact with air or wind. We calculated the most accurate air resistance we could using the airplane's deceleration.
Reflection
We had a lot of fun making this project, partially because we got to choose the subject matter, and partially because we understand physics a lot right now after taking an entire year of it. We succeeded in communicating well as we spent lots of time on the phone with each other in order to work out the little details in our project. We also spent almost all of our class time being productive which is unusual especially so near the end of the year and with the exam and final already over with. We had a good sense of our priorities and conscientious learning duties throughout this project.
Something we probably could have done better was to collaborate more, as we ended up realizing too late that we were not on the same page and had different ideas of the direction we were taking. We originally had the idea to include the wright brothers plane, and maybe compare how the two planes flew. We discovered that half the team thought we were making a wright brothers plane model, while the other half thought that we were just adding some of the wright brothers plane to our own plane model. We could have also done better in our cultural competence. We did not take into account very many perspectives of our project, and didn't ask for the opinions of others on how we could be more inclusive in our research.