Smithsonian Education presents "Airplanes and Airports: How to Take Off Without Ever Leaving the Ground." Teachers can download this teaching package that discusses airplanes and airports. Included in the discussion are the forces of...

This lesson introduces students to the art of designing an airplane through paper airplane constructions. The goal is that students will learn important aircraft design considerations and how engineers must iterate their designs to...

In this activity, young scholars design their own airplanes and fly them. The challenge is to create a fast plane and a slow plane and compare the speed to the design.

Students will experiment with different styles of paper airplanes, create questions to test, and design experiments that will allow them to gather data related to their question. They will record their data, using graphs where...

This site features several lesson ideas and activities on Amelia Earhart and airplanes for young learners.

This lesson focuses on the importance of airplanes in today's society. Airplanes of all shapes and sizes are used for hundreds of different reasons, including recreation, commercial business, public transportation, and delivery of goods,...

In this fun lesson plan, you will be the "customer" ordering a paper airplane, and your student teams will be engineering companies that will manufacture planes. Before they start making planes, they need to define the criteria and...

With this resource, teachers can select the most appropriate academic level and download a lesson plan that contains images, Word documents and PDF resources for teaching about the history of black Americans in aviation. Excellent...

Examine how fuel use affects the mass of different planes during flight. This lesson teaches students how to determine the per person fuel cost of a transatlantic flight for seven airplanes, and display the results on a bar graph. Three...

Through this series of three lessons, students will gain an understanding of the basics of flight. They will learn about the four forces of flight and practice their observation skills through a number of fun experiments. In addition,...

This lesson is an exciting conclusion to the airplanes unit that encourages students to think creatively. After a review of the concepts learned, students will design their own flying machine based on their knowledge of the forces...

Students revisit Bernoulli's Principle (Lesson 1 of the Airplanes unit) and learn how engineers use this principle to design airplane wings. Airplane wings create lift by changing the pressure of the air around it. This is the first of...

The purpose of this lesson is to help students understand the relationship between the mass and the weight of an object. Students will study the properties of common materials and why airplanes use specific materials.

This instructional activity explores the drag force on airplanes. The students will be introduced to the concept of conservation of energy and how it relates to drag. Students will explore the relationship between drag and the shape,...

This site from the Illinois Institute of Technology provides a student lab activity in which the flight of a paper airplane is investigated and studied. Designed for primary grades, but easily adaptable for junior high students.

Students begin to explore the idea of a force. To further their understanding of drag, gravity and weight, they conduct activities that model the behavior of parachutes and helicopters. An associated literacy activity engages the class...

Students are introduced to Newton's third law of motion, and then learn that engineers apply Newton's third law and an understanding of reaction forces when designing a wide range of creations, from rockets and aircraft to door knobs,...

In this project, students will develop knowledge and skills related to the construction of vehicle/craft systems. They will identify and describe the major systems and components of vehicles, aircraft, and/or watercraft such as body,...

This paper airplane lesson plan helps students learn about certain concepts like air resistance, motion, and aerodynamics.

In this instructional activity, students explore primary resources to see what people who lived in the early age of flight felt about this innovation. They then compare that response to that towards an invention of today.

For this project, students use real time data to learn how pilots navigate when they fly. Students go through a series of lessons on vectors, weather maps and flight tracking, then take a pilot's test where they apply what they have...

In this lesson plan, students learn about the costs and benefits of regulations and regulatory agencies. It includes nine video clips.

Students work in teams to investigate how aerospace engineering relates to sports, especially golf ball design and the physics of bounce. They use this information to determine whether these aerospace principles can be applied to...

Advancements in transportation have played a key role in the growth of our nation. U.S.government policies have also had a considerable impact on the development of transport as we know it today. In this series of three lessons, the...