Paige STEM Grant Recipient Flies Classroom to New Heights
Remember when you were a kid, bored in class, so you and your friends made paper airplanes to see how far you could throw them to the front of the classroom? The thrill of throwing your plane and not getting caught is a nostalgic memory for many. After a few plane throwing contests, you many have tested a few different designs to see if your paper plane could go farther. One creative teacher in Cheney, Washington, decided to turn this beloved (and sometimes troublemaking) activity into a fun science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) project for her students.
STEM educator Sarah Dryden was awarded AFCEA’s Paige STEM Grant last spring and has been busy teaching her students about the forces of flight and aerodynamics. “We used the grant to purchase a hands-on STEM class kit called ‘Make It Fly.’ This kit has allowed students to explore different aspects of aerodynamics by building, testing and adjusting several different flying machines, such as skimmers, paper helicopters, boomerangs, styrene planes, aerobies and paper airplanes. They have learned about lift, weight, thrust and drag, and they have explored how each of these forces affects how far and long their machines stay in the air and how far they travel. They have also learned a lot about the invention design process, recording data, how to make measurable changes to a design and why we only change one variable at a time,” Dryden shared.
Dryden’s students were able to fly styrene planes, which was one of their favorite activities in class. Styrene planes are model airplanes made from Styrofoam. “They tested how adding weight to their planes affected how far it flew. They tested and recorded data each time they added weight and kept going to see if there was a threshold where the weight began to slow it down,” Dryden said. “Thank you again for awarding us this grant. We couldn’t have offered this class without it, and the students have learned so much and had a ton of fun with this class.”
Interested in supporting STEM projects like Dryden’s? Please consider donating to the AFCEA Educational Foundation by scanning the QR code below or by reaching out to edfoundation@afcea.org.
