STEM Glider Challenge Part 2

Hi, I'm Jared with Fun Science Demos. In a previous video, we gave a huge shout out to a really creative picture book called After the Fall by Dan Santat. In the book, the egg Humpty Dumpty conquers his fears and learns how to fly. So that inspired us to see if we could make our own Humpty Dumpty plastic egg fly by creating and designing a glider. We're going to take what we learned from that video and see if we can make a brand new glider out of foam pool noodles or foam pipe insulators. Our goal is simple. We want our glider to carry our plastic Humpty Dumpty as far as it possibly can. Now, pool noodles work great for these gliders because they're colorful and they're flexible and they're long and they're easy to chop down into manageable sections. But we're deciding to go with pipe insulation here because you can find these anywhere at any season. It doesn't have to be in the summer. And it has a slit down the center which makes it a lot easier to work with. So we need to start by determining the overall length of the body of our glider. And the nice thing about these foam pieces, we can make our glider as long as one foam piece or I can cut this up if I wanted to get a couple different glider bodies. So I can make a lot of different gliders to test to see which one flies the furthest. So we decided to start with a piece that's about 30 centimeters long. Now, the first thing I want to do is remove this little cellophane piece which reveals a sticky side of the foam. And I'm just going to stick the pieces together, pinch them so I know it's nice and secure. I may even want to run a piece of tape to reinforce that. In fact, that's a great idea because if an egg is going to fit into the end, I'm going to need to open up the top part. And that's what's nice about this. I can now close that with a piece of tape and I have my glider body ready to go. So you can see we've reinforced that seam with a piece of tape. Any tape will work. Now I need to make sure my egg is secured in there. So I'm just going to take another piece of tape. I don't want to secure it in so well I can't remove it because I will be adding something to our Humpty Dumpty egg that will affect how well our glider flies. Now the next step is to add the wings and that's going to help our glider fly longer and straighter. So we're going to use cardboard to make our fins. We can find cardboard anywhere. It's easy to draw on and it's relatively easy to cut out. But we have to make sure we use a ruler because we need our fins to be the same size and same shape so our glider stays balanced as it flies. So we've zoomed in so you can get a closer look at how we're going to design our fins. And the first thing I'm going to think about is shapes. Do I want to use triangles or trapezoids? I could use half circles. That's the really neat part about designing our glider. We could try many different shapes. I'm going to start by tracing these triangles and cutting those out to see how our triangles work. So I have a rectangle. I'm going to cut that rectangle in half and I will know I have two triangles that are the same size. I can also trace trapezoids. You'll notice I started each trapezoid in a rectangle. I measured the rectangles to make sure the rectangles are the exactly the same size. I want to have two because I want to put one fin on each side of my glider to keep it balanced. So here I have two trapezoids and two triangles. Now it's time to cut them out. So you can see we have our fins cut out and the nice part about this is I can now decide where I want those fins to go. My triangular fins, I can try putting them toward the back of my glider. These trapezoidal fins, I could actually try putting them in the middle of the glider or toward the back or even closer to the front. I wonder if that would really affect how the glider flies and it probably will. I can also talk about adding a tail fin to see if that impacts how the glider flies. And that really is the fun part of this design challenge is you get to make a lot of different gliders to compare how they fly. You can change this one glider again and again and again because I'm only using tape to tape on our fins or you could make a lot of different gliders that have different length bodies. It would be really cool to turn this into a glider to see how this one flies but let's add the wings and talk about how we attach the wings next. So now it's time to attach our fins to our glider and it's very very important that our fins are attached at the exact same spot on each side so it stays balanced. So I could just simply tape these fins in place using tape but it's a little tricky to make sure they're in the same spot so we're going to use a small toothpick or a wooden skewer so that we can line it up and make sure that we're going through and coming out at exactly the same spot on our foam glider. So we've zoomed in so you can get a better look at how we're going to do this. I'm going to make sure my toothpick is nice and straight nice and perpendicular to my foam and push it through so that it's coming out at the exact same spot as it went in. Now it's time to attach our fin so I'm going to hold one side of the toothpick line up my fin center it right on the cardboard give it a gentle push and it holds perfectly in place. Let's do our other fin I need to pinch that toothpick in the cardboard line everything up and now I'm ready to tape and I have a nicely balanced glider. Now adding the tape is a little bit tricky so what I'm going to do is start by putting the tape onto the foam glider use my fingertips to really work it into that seam where the wing or the fin meets the glider. Let's do the other side started on the foam and kind of roll it down into the fin use my fingertips to really seat that tape well along the seam. Now we flip it over and do the same thing on the other side. So I have our right and left wing attached and I added a tail fin you can see our toothpick sticking out the top because this fin is a little narrow so to handle that to make it safe I'm just going to take a scissors snip that off and I'm ready to see how it flies. So we're almost ready to fly but first we wanted to talk about one little design feature so to do that we have a yellow dot right there and we used a ruler to measure and find the center of our glider. I'm going to lightly hold the center of my glider and let go and I want you to watch what happens when I let go you can see every single time my glider tilts to one side. Why? Well because all the weight of these fins and wings put it in the back of my glider so that's going to impact how my glider flies if all the weight is in the back the nose will want to swoop up and it won't fly as far so how do we fix that? So let's put some paper clips into our nose cone here our plastic humpty dumpty egg now I would definitely count these we're just tossing them in but count them that way you know exactly how many paper clips you're putting in if we put too many in it's too heavy we can take some out if we didn't put enough in we can add more now I'll definitely want to tape that shut before flying but let's try our balance method here hold it gently and you can see there's a little too much weight in the nose cone so pop this off let's take some back out so we took some out let's put our nose cap back on let's test it there we go it's a little bit heavy I might want to take out a couple more but it's seems like it's pretty straight depending on how those paper clips shift so I say let's put a piece of tape on our nose cone and test fly it. So now the fun part we're ready to test launch this and see how it flies and that's really the fun part of this is testing it to see how it flies coming back making changes to see if we can make it fly further we can even go as far as adding different shaped or size wings testing it out to see how it flies adding more weight in the front adding less weight in the front testing to see how it flies once you have it built the testing is the important part so here we go we're ready to test fly let's see if we can get this to fly three two one so our glider seemed really stable in flight in air but it seemed like the nose of the glider was a little bit heavy so let's try taking out some paper clips and try it again cap it back up tape it over let's give it another test flight a lighter nose cone let's see how it flies three two one real scientists and engineers do exactly what we just did they problem solve they fix things and change things to make them work better there are so many different designs you can make from these simple foam gliders from the shape and size of the wings to where you place the wings to where you attach the egg to the overall size could it be shorter or could we even make a glider this long i think we're going to definitely try making a glider this long to see how it flies we'd like to thank dan santat for writing his book after the fall and inspiring us to make our foam gliders if you want some more stem design challenge ideas or want to learn anything about science check out our youtube channel fun science demos science is so cool especially when you get to fly things