Paper Airplane Activity Worksheets - Velocity Lesson Plan - Teach Vectors

Looking for an easy prep velocity experiment? Try our print or digital Paper Plane Lab for middle or high school students. This engaging 2-day lesson plan includes 7 worksheets. The worksheets are perfect to follow up lessons about vector, scalar, and how those apply to velocity and displacement. The activities help students understand the difference through experiential learning. The treasure hunt worksheets tasks students with learning the difference between displacement and distance. The velocity lesson teaches the equations for speed and velocity. There are extra worksheets that introduce position-time graphs and tasks students with what the graphs mean as well as doing calculations. Step-by-step instructions make the lab easy to understand. Questions are based on bloom’s taxonomy and encourage higher-order thinking. 

Topics Covered:

Velocity, Speed, Displacement, Distance, Scalar, Vector, Position-Time graphs

7 Print or Digital Lab Worksheets

Middle to High School 

2 Treasure Hunt Worksheets ( Displacement activity )

1 Lab Worksheet - Paper Airplane Activity

4 Handouts based on Position Time Graphs

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Students Will

• Follow along as you introduce vector, scalar, distance, and displacement
• Do a treasure hunt worksheet activity that tasks students with finding the treasure using displacement
• Follow along as you introduce velocity, speed, and position time graphs
• Build a paper airplane. They will throw paper planes and measure distance, displacement, and time. They will use this data to calculate velocity.
• There are multiple worksheets for students to understand position-time graphs

Instructions included

Worksheets have instructions included

Uses

This lesson works both digitally and in person. Since this is a 2-day lesson there are two different activities The teacher will present their own slides on displacement for day 1 and velocity for day 2. The first lesson involves a displacement activity. The treasure hunt worksheets are a graphing activity. The paper airplane is an activity where students will create paper airplanes to calculate the velocity. There are many fun types of airplanes you could make through youtube tutorials. 

Activity Instructions - Students will create paper airplanes and calculate the distance and displacement. They will time their flight. This will allow them to calculate speed and velocity. 

For younger students, you may want to only remove the position-time graph as it could be too difficult

NGSS Standards