Ballistics – STEAM activity

Our STEAM activity for April is to investigate how things travel through the air.

How is this activity related to PK Porthcurno?

You may have seen this newspaper article in our Easter PK Play at Home feature online, it was about the sports days that were held at the Cable & Wireless Training College here at Porthcurno. If you did, we hope you enjoyed trying out the races, and shared a picture with us? There were lots of field events- in this activity you can try out a throwing event, but we’re not going to ask you to build and throw a javelin!

Did you know?

The science of how things travel after they’ve been launched and let go is called ballistics. If you know Newton’s Law’s of Motion and Gravitation, you can make very accurate predictions of where things will land. If you can throw things high and fast enough, they will orbit the Earth instead of landing. You’ll need a very big rocket to do the throwing!

There are lots of websites and books which will show you paper plane designs. We did an Ecosia search for ‘paper plane designs’ and all the ones we saw were family-friendly!

Make your own paper plane!

Below is a film that Paul took to show how to make a paper plane – including the launch of it inside his house! Can you create one and see how far it can travel? Maybe you could conduct some test trials and see if you can make the planes go further depending on different wind or weather conditions.

Download the instructions to create your own paper plane and watch it fly!

Our download includes how we folded our plane. As always, we would love to see your efforts – feel free to share on our social media channels.

#PKPorthcurno #PKsportsday #SteamExplorers #PlayfulMuseums