A lesson in paper air planes

I can not take full credit for the air plane launcher. I saw a picture on pintrest and thought it would be so much fun to do with our Cub Scout Pack. But I am not good at keeping things simple and went all out, it is a normal thing around here. After making the launcher and realizing I am not good at making paper airplanes I ended up looking for patterns and decided this would be an amazing lesson for our classroom. So we looked up aerodynamics of paper airplanes. Who knew there was such a science to it all.  This turned into hours of fun. We did not color our airplanes because we were way to busy testing our planes to see if they would fly.

Let us start with the launcher
First you need a piece of scrap wood. (We used a small piece of pallet wood because I am obsessed with pallet projects.) 2 screws and a rubber band and tape. I choose to paint ours so I needed paint.

Just screw the screws in evenly in a straight line. 

We used screws because the nail did not want to go in the pallet.
If you do that you are going to want to tape it really well. 

I painted it blue since this was for Cubscouts. 

Then I painted a runway. 

After our Launcher was completed we took a giant cardboard and cut out openings. But we decided we want to redo it using wood so it really last. (I will post pictures after we make it.)

Standing the cardboard up was tricky but it was worth it in the end. I did not take pictures of our folding because I was folding. 

 This turned into an all day project. Our neighbors even joined in on the fun.