The hoop glider!!!

Our activity started with kids imagining to go to school  by a car, that is environmental friendly and flies in the air. One of them said , if he lived on a mountain and the school was in a valley he would do paragliding. So, we talked about gliders and how they fly without motors.Gliders always descend relative to the air in which they are flying. Para gliders, hand gliders are some of the gliders that we see these days.


What are Gliders?

Gliders are a type of aircraft which do not have engine, but use the wing design and air flow to fly around.

Now, it was time for them to build one themselves, but using a different design and shape that they had seen. I gave them a straw to throw, which did not go very far. As they were brain storming, the idea of adding loops instead of the wings came to them. They were quick to decide that they would need 2 hoops instead of one to make it fly for some time. That is how kids made a hoop glider. It worked really well.

design for making the two hoops glider

Materials needed

1. Plastic drinking straws
2. Chart or card  paper
3. Tape
4. Scissors

Kids are busy working on their gliders

 Procedure

1. Cut 2 strips of paper. Make one strip 1 inch  (2.5 cm) wide and 5 inches long and the other strip 1 inch wide and 10 inches long.
2. Curl each strip into a  hoop. Overlap the paper before sticking them together using the cello tape. You will have one small and one big hoop.
3. Attach the hoops to the straw. Make sure you attach the small loop on the top and big loop on the bottom end of the straw.
4. Hold your straw in the middle and throw it like a spear with the small hoop in the front.
5. How far does your glider go?.

Variations 

Now that kids had fun throwing the hoop glider and measuring the distance it had glided they gave the following ideas for variations such as

1. Change the length of the straw.
2. Increase the number of hoops
3. Make equal sizes of hoop.
4. Increase the glider weight.
5. Change the placement of the loops on the straw.



When kids tried out the experiment following are the observations they had observed.

1. Increasing the loops to 3 hoops made the glider nose dive and didn't fly well.
2. The longer straw glided better than the shorter ones.
3. Equal sizes of loops glided the same distance as the original one.

Various types of gliders