Paper Airplane Contest


In this series, I am sharing how I design my STEAM curriculum.   Post #1 - The introduction,  Post #2 - After the topic is chosen,  Post #3 - Wind tunnels, Post #4 - Recruiting an Expert, and in this post, I will be sharing with you my preliminary plans for hosting a paper airplane contest. 

You may be wondering why I am sharing about creating a paper airplane event before I've shared the standards, scientific principles, lesson objectives, and activities. Rest assured, I've been working on those too and will get to them in due time. I tend to be a big picture person. I want to know what the students are working towards. Sure, you could say they are working toward mastery of the standards. That doesn't cut it for me. That type of thinking didn't interest me as a child and it doesn't do much for me as an adult. I am a seeker of fun, memorable events, competition, and community. So, I will put in the extra effort to create a culminating activity for everyone. In this instance, I am going to create a paper airplane contest.

Questions bombard my mind. How big do I want this contest? Do I want to have it be a regional contest? Should I host it at the university located in the town? Do I want to include other school districts in the area? Where should this event take place? When should I schedule it? What are the rules for the competition? Will there be any prizes? How do I manage the competition? Who can I recruit to help? Do I need any funding? What type of registration is needed? Will I charge a small fee? 

First, I look online for paper airplane contests. I found some direction in these places:

Scholastic - Paper Airplane Contest
Paper Airplane Contest Rules
Carrol College - Paper Airplane Contest

These three sites gave me enough guidance. The rules they suggested seem fairly simple to me (especially when compared to spelling bee rules). 

After looking at these sites I took some time to brainstorm ideas. Here's my list. I'm sure I will be adding to it in the future, but I feel like it's a good start. 


When could this event happen? I took a look at the district calendar. Do I want to host it during the school day? Not really. I would have to negotiate time with the classroom teachers and specialists. I know that classroom time is valuable, especially since March of 2020 when the students started spending a lot of time learning from home. It would be nice if the event was toward the end of the unit. I landed on November 4th or 5th as a possible date. Students do not attend school on these two days because they are the end of the quarter and blocked off for teachers to calculate grades, produce report cards, and host parent conferences. While I have to calculate grades, as a specialist I am expected to have them entered into the report card system a week early. I need to contact my principal for approval.

Where can I host this event? I want to host the event indoors so the wind doesn't factor into the results. If I have to do the event during the school day I would choose to host it in the high school auditorium. The students can walk from the elementary school to the auditorium. If I don't have to host the event during the school day I would like to host it in the middle school gym. I need to contact the principals of both schools to look into the possibilities of scheduling a time for the event in their facility. (Note: If I have to do this event during the school day I will schedule it on November 1st-3rd and take the groups to the high school during their regularly scheduled STEAM time.)

Help!? Yes, I would like some help. The type of help I need depends on when the event can take place. For now, I will throw out some requests to the Parent Action Team, the university's education department, and the university's engineering department. Hopefully, someone will respond with a yes. If I can host the event on November 4th or 5th I will have Jeff, my aeronautics expert, help with the event. That way he can spend time talking with small groups of people throughout the day.

For now, I decided to keep the event in the school district. If it's during the school day, I will only have my students participate and possibly their parents. If I can host it on November 4th or 5th, I will invite anyone in the school district including family members, teachers, and school board members. In this case, there will be different categories (K-2; 3-5; 6-9; 10-12; family members, and school district members).

At this point, the contest will include three areas, farthest distance, accuracy, and time aloft. I will use three pocket charts for the leaderboard, one for each contest. This way I can record everyone's flight information on a strip of paper and move the strips in the pocket charts according to their statistics.

If I host the event on November 4th or 5th, a registration form will need to be created. I decided that if the event is on one of those days I would host it from 8-4. That way people could sign up for a launch time, the event wouldn't be overcrowded, and parents could arrange their child's participation around their conferences. I have other ideas for this event such as display boards from my students, possible booths from area businesses, etc. ...

In my next post, I will talk about the standards for the curriculum.

“Sometimes, flying feels too God-like to be attained by man. Sometimes, the world from above seems too beautiful, too wonderful, too distant for human eyes to see.” – Charles A. Lindbergh




Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

I Can Statements for Programming with Scratch

Image
    For second quarter, I put together a coding unit for the 3rd-5th grade classes I teach. I have taught computer programming through various means over the years and decided to use Scratch this year. Students using Scratch can learn to develop their computational thinking and logic skills while actually making a game or an animation. Other software, like code.org, develops these skills while having the students play games. Both avenues of learning have their place.      Scratch has improved over the years and now has tutorials available for the students to learn how some of the command blocks work. As students follow the tutorials they get a basic understanding of the goal or outcome they are trying to achieve and can add embellishments from there.      I developed a rubric for students to map the level of computer programmer they wanted to become. The rubric is a list of "I can" statements related to my unit goals, at the top, and the types of ...
Read more

Wind Tunnels

 Greetings to everyone who is following me. In this series, I am sharing how I design my STEAM curriculum.    Post #1 - The introduction ,  Post #2 - After the topic is chosen ,  and in this post, I will talk about one of my random ideas, wind tunnels. It seems crazy, even to me, that I would be thinking about building wind tunnels with 3-5th grade students during a 14-day unit. Rest assured, this is only an idea. There's no guarantee that I will act upon this idea. However, I did find some good information and resources.  Before I get too excited about wind tunnels, I must let you know, I did flesh out the Next Generation Science Standards that I will cover in this curriculum. Yes, I will share them with you in a later post. They weren't the first thing I thought about, but I know it is necessary to identify them. Enough about the standards and on to wind tunnels.  As I was looking through the books I mentioned in my first post of the series, I came ...
Read more

What Do We Know/Wonder About Aeronautics?

Image
  Designing an Aeronautics Curriculum The introduction After the topic is chosen Wind tunnels Recruiting an Expert Preliminary plans for hosting a paper airplane contest   Next Generation Science Standards that align with this aeronautics curriculum.  Mini-lesson 1 - What do we know/wonder about aeronautics? Activity 1 - Frisbees and boomerangs What Do We Know/Wonder About Aeronautics? On the first day of the unit, each group will participate in an introduction lesson. I use the KWL strategy to access student knowledge and facilitate inquiry. Each class has its own chart. My classroom/makerspace is full, so posting 6 physical charts is difficult. I like using Google Slides to display notes specific to each class. Here's a link to a clean copy of my KWL slides . The KWL chart is made as a master slide. It's not necessary to create the table as a slide theme but I find it easier to use this way. I color-coded the backgrounds to each slide. This is a classroom strategy I use...
Read more