Engineering Explorers

It all began with a concert ticket.

More specifically, a ticket to a concert on the Ben Folds Paper Airplane Request Tour 2024.

During these concerts, Ben Folds—an Emmy-nominated singer-songwriter-composer—encourages fans in the audience to send their song requests to the stage via paper airplanes.

To ensure that the planes carrying my song requests would make it all the way from my seat in the concert venue to the stage, I began practicing my paper airplane folding skills.

Then I had an epiphany: Why not introduce the art of making paper airplanes to my early learners to help them develop their engineering and design thinking skills?

And so began our week of paper airplane play.

Passing on the art and technique of paper airplane building is a generational gift. From the thousands of adults folding airplanes at those Ben Folds concerts to the scores of older siblings, parents, and grandparents who joined in the airplane-folding fun during our week of paper airplane play, everyone seems to remember how to make a paper airplane. It's one of those life skills that we rarely forget.

Paper airplane construction is a playful way to introduce the engineering process to young learners. Sheets of paper that would otherwise be destined for the recycling bin are transformed into one of the most timeless, educational, and entertaining toys in existence!

Joe, a dad in our early childhood community, spent more than an hour with our gang—patiently folding paper and tweaking designs as he schooled the children in the aerodynamics of a paper airplane in flight.

Joe introduced us to the four forces of flight:

• Lift
• Weight
• Thrust
• Drag

These four forces must be balanced for any plane to fly, whether it's a paper airplane or a real airplane that can fly us to distant parts of the country or the globe.

“Scientists and engineers start with a model, like a paper airplane, to test new ideas before they make the bigger models," Joe told the children. "You need to design, create, and test—just like engineers."

After Joe introduced the activity, the children dove enthusiastically into the engineering process, asking questions, forming hypotheses, and testing solutions as they refined their preliminary designs.

“Why did my plane crash so fast?” asked Alicia.

“You need to push it harder!" instructed her friend, Emilio. "And aim up, like this!”

“That push is called thrust,” Joe reminded the children. “You have to grunt when you throw it! Plant your feet firmly and keep your hand steady. Lift is what will hold the plane up in the air."

"Drag from the air makes your paper airplane slow down," he added. "The airplane’s weight, along with the force of gravity, pulls it back to the ground and it crashes. You need more thrust to keep it in the air longer.”

But, by this time, the children were so engrossed in the engineering process that no one was paying attention!

Joe and I both smiled, knowing that he was planting the seeds of knowledge in children who were probably too young to fully comprehend most of what he was sharing.

Early exposure to concepts, even if not fully understood, builds a foundational knowledge base. Just as a seed needs soil to grow, young minds need early experiences to develop later understanding.

Children may not understand complicated ideas right away, but they still pick up new words and basic concepts that advance their overall learning and brain development. 

Even at this basic level, the children were learning through hands-on play that the shape of the plane, the creases on the wings, and the sharpness of the nose tip were all factors that affected flight performance.

When they noticed that some planes flew better than others, they were learning about aerodynamics, or how air moves around objects.

What looked like a fun day of engineering and launching paper airplanes was also an early lesson in physics!

Our youngest learners had enough success with the basic three-fold paper airplane design to stay engaged in the activity, ask questions, and persevere—just like real engineers. By the end of the week, they were adding more folds to their creations or mastering the classic “dart” paper airplane design.

Along the way, they learned the names of a few different classic paper airplane designs. Click here to find Engineering Emily's instructions for four simple and fun paper airplane designs for kids, including:

• The Dart
• The Chase
• The Bullet
• The Glider

Emily is a real-life engineer and a mom who loves helping kids find the fun in STEAM disciplines such as science, technology, engineering, art, and math.

As the children at our early learning center perfected their paper planes—folding, creasing, and pinching their paper sheets into flightworthy aircraft—they were also developing their fine motor skills, which will come in handy later as they learn how to hold a pencil and write their ABCs.

They also learned that it was important to line up the ends carefully before creasing the fold. This helped them develop traits that will help them succeed in school and in life, such as patience and self-discipline.

Paper folding is a skill used by early childhood development experts to assess visual-motor abilities. For the children in our program who struggled to accurately line up the edges of the paper sheets, or those who had a hard time duplicating what they were seeing, making a paper airplane was great practice!

There was less pressure to "get it right" in this playful setting. Plus, the activity was so much fun that the children were naturally inclined to "try and try again."

With each successive attempt and each completed airplane, the children learned something new. This simple paper airplane project helped them understand that designing and making things involves thinking, planning, trying, and improving.

Rather than being discouraged when their designs fell short of "flightworthiness," the children learned that mistakes are just another way of learning what works and what doesn't.

Children naturally engage in engineering exploration and discovery early in life. By harnessing their innate curiosity about how things work—and how to make them work better—we can prepare the early learners of today to be the innovators and problem-solvers of tomorrow.

Ready to embark on your own week of paper airplane engineering? Use our Designing Paper Airplanes lesson plan to introduce your early engineers to a week of aeronautic exploration!