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‘Helicopters’ help students take flight

Published Tuesday, September 08, 2009 1:39 PM

By Michael Tannebaum
Summerville Journal Scene ®

Upon first glance, one may have thought Lucille Huelsman’s seventh-grade class was in a state of chaos Aug. 27.

Scattered throughout the Gregg Middle School classroom, about one-fourth of the students stood atop chairs while the remaining children gathered in small clusters around them. The students on the chairs were laughing and clutching paper helicopters. It looked like a scene that no teacher would envy.

Each of the students, however, was actually following every one of Huelsman’s instructions. At their teacher’s request, the students had split into small groups and conducted experiments with paper helicopters that required each group to perform all the steps in the scientific method.

Prior to the activity, the students had learned the parts of the scientific method, such as observation, the need for repeated trials and how to develop and test a hypothesis. To apply what they learned, the students made predictions about the effect added weight would have on the amount of time it takes a paper helicopter to fall to the floor when dropped from about 10 feet aboveground.

In each group, the helicopter was dropped a total of 20 times – five times without a paper clip attached, five times with one paper clip attached and so on. One group member was responsible for dropping the helicopter while standing on the chair, another used a stopwatch to capture the amount of time it took the chopper to touch the ground from the moment it was released and a third recorded the results on a worksheet, which allowed for comparison between the different time trials.

Rachel Illsley said her group correctly predicted what the additional weight would do to the helicopter.

“We’ve found that the more paper clips we put on the plane, the faster it drops to the ground,” Illsley said. “It’s what we hypothesized would happen.”

Contact Michael Tannebaum at 873-9424 ext. 215 or mtannebaum@journalscene.com

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