Flight

Read a sentence from Science Trek that contains one or more vocabulary words. Rephrase it in a new way that still illustrates the same scientific fact.

Create your own paper airplane without any help and test it. Share your point of view about your plane and how it is designed to fly. Why did it glide for a long distance, make dips and curves, or crash quickly?

Using a model of a wing, explain how flight happens. Use information from Science Trek to help explain how the four forces apply.

Explain why birds use thermals and how this gives them lift.

List as many objects as you can that are able to fly, and count them. Compile a class list and count how many items have been generated. 

Create a paper airplane. Fly it and measure the distance that it flies. Compare to other students' flights.

Create a graph showing the distance that early "flying machines" stayed airborne.

A situation that people want to change or create can be approached as a problem to be solved through engineering. Such problems may have many acceptable solutions.

• Pushes and pulls can have different strengths and directions.

• Pushing or pulling on an object can change the speed or direction of its motion and can start or stop it.

• A bigger push or pull makes things speed up or slow down more quickly.

• Different properties are suited to different purposes.

• Examples of properties could include strength, flexibility, hardness, texture, and absorbency

• Force applied to an object can alter the position and motion of that object.

• The patterns of an object's motion in various situations can be observed and measured; when that past motion exhibits a regular pattern, future motion can be predicted from it.

Each force acts on one particular object and has both strength and a direction. An object at rest typically has multiple forces acting on it, but they add to give zero net force on the object. Forces that do not sum to zero can cause changes in the object's speed or direction of motion.

Animals have various body systems with specific functions for sustaining life.

Different solutions need to be tested in order to determine which of them best solves the problem, given the criteria and the constraints.

Possible solutions to a problem are limited by available materials and resources (constraints.) The success of a designed solution is determined by considering the desired features of a solution (criteria.) Different proposals for solutions can be compared on the basis of how well each one meets the specified criteria for success or how well each takes the constraints into account.

Energy is present whenever there are moving objects, sound, light, or heat. When objects collide, energy can be transferred from one object to another, thereby changing their motion.

The faster a given object is moving, the more energy it possesses.

Populations of animals are classified by their characteristics.

• The gravitational force of Earth acting on an object near Earth's surface pulls that object toward the planet's center.

• "Downward" is a local description of the direction that points toward the center of the spherical Earth.

Natural selection leads to the predominance of certain traits in a population, and the suppression of others.

In multicellular organisms, the body is a system of multiple interacting subsystems. These subsystems are groups of cells that work together to form tissues and organs that are specialized for particular body functions.

• Motion energy is properly called kinetic energy; it is proportional to the mass of the moving object and grows with the square of its speed.

• Emphasis is on descriptive relationships between kinetic energy and mass separately from kinetic energy and speed.

Forces that act at a distance (electric, magnetic, and gravitational) can be explained by fields that can be mapped by their effect on a test object.

Gravitational forces are always attractive. There is a gravitational force between any two masses, but it is very small except when one or both of the objects have large mass-e.g., the Earth and the Sun.

• The motion of an object is determined by the sum of the forces acting on it; if the total force on the object is not zero, its motion will change. The greater the mass of the object, the greater the force needed to achieve the same change in motion. For any given object, a larger force causes a larger change in motion.

• All positions of objects and the directions of forces and motions must be described in an arbitrarily chosen reference frame and arbitrarily chosen units of size.

• Emphasis is on balanced and unbalanced forces in a system, qualitative comparisons of forces, mass and changes in motion, frame of reference, and specification of units.