To start the semester with an activity that would get the science gears in our brains going, we were tasked with coming up with an experiment that had to do with a paper airplane’s flight distance. My partner, Everett, and I came up with the testable question “How does a design of a plane affect its flight distance?”, with the idea of modelling three different paper airplanes found online using the same sized paper. We chose three designs; the world record, the dart, and the normal. Our hypothesis was that “If the World Record design plane is the World Record, then it will fly the farthest of the three because it is the best design out of the three.” Our hypothesis was accepted, as the World Record (averaging at 12.8m) design outflew the Dart (9.1 m) by almost 4 meters, while the Normal design averaged at 11.4.

My important takeaway from this little experiment is that trial and error with paper planes and origami is a key part of such an experiment, because even the smallest imprecision fold may cause the plane to go completely haywire. It also took a lot of patience to go through the many steps of making the planes, something that I struggled with at first. Nevertheless, I think that in the future it may be more efficient to have a more precise outcome to the experiment is to make and having more prototypes of each model to have the best and most accurate representation of the designs.