Flight Adventures is a free 68-page unit study download aimed at elementary students, sponsored by the Children’s Museum in Indianapolis. The unit was funded by a NASA grant. The unit explores the role that model aircraft have played in the past and continue to play in exploring the science of flight.
Modeling is essential to math, science, and engineering — in fact, to all creative thinking. The model is a metaphor — a way of understanding cause and effect, a context, and an outcome.
With this in mind, the student learns:
- The history of model use in solving aviation problems.
- How models are used to test new ideas, solve problems, and improve flight performance and safety.
- How models present the properties of flight.
This hands-on unit study includes five activities:
- A lesson on weight and lift.
- A lesson on thrust and drag using a paper rocket construction.
- A lesson on controlling the three dynamics of flight — yaw, pitch, and roll.
- Designing, building, testing, and flying a model.
- Constructing a rubber-band-powered model.
Each lesson can be broken up into two parts making the unit study as long or as short as required to fit in your schedule.
Benefits of Model Flying
Flight Adventures is a well-crafted unit covering standards in science, language arts, reading, and mathematics. Interspersed throughout the activities are side information on the background of flight, the objectives of NASA, aeronautic careers, and more. You’ll also find recommended books, suggestions for science notebooks, web resources, vocabulary, printables, and teacher videos.
I encourage young people who have any interest in aviation at all, or even if you don’t know if you have an interest in aviation, go try model flying.
And the learning, the introduction you’re going to get from models, is going to transfer directly, in my opinion, into flying a full-scale airplane. And it’s just ‘plane’ fun.”
Robert “Hoot” Gibson, Ambassador for the Academy of Model Aeronautics
Free Resource
Additional Resources
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When you get to the section on kits, you might find the resources here helpful.
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