Local Students Learn About Aeronautical Engineering By Building Paper Airplanes
By John McDevitt
BRYN MAWR, Pa., (CBS) -- Students at a Bryn Mawr elementary school were learning about aeronautical engineering and having fun doing it. The program is designed to help kids interested and engaged in the hi-tech fields of Science, Technology, Engineering and Math.
Using things like paper, straws, paper clips, tape and pennies for cargo about 80 students from Saints Colman-John Neumann Catholic School in Bryn Mawr were given the task to design, build and test a glider. They were getting tips from structural analysis engineer Matt Palmer, who works on real planes for Boeing.
"You have your wings, you have your center of gravity, you have weight distribution, you have your air flow with the wings," said Palmer.
Eleven-year-old Bryn Donnelly says activities like these help apply what they learn in the classroom into practice.
"How far object can go even if they are heavier or lighter."
One of the challenges the kids were facing was distributing the weight of the cargo or pennies and making their glider fly farther than the other teams.