🔎 Project information
- Project name: What makes an airplane fly?
- Service: Seedlings & Co Early Learning Centre, Calamvale
- Award: Queensland Winner of the Excellence in Early STEM Education Awards 2024
- Frequency: Daily for 9 weeks
- Number of children: 26
- Age of children: 3-6 years
💥 Project spark
When spending time at Brig-O-Doon Aged Care, the children became fascinated with the soaring noise of airplanes overhead. One child asked “What makes a plane fly?”
💡 Collecting ideas
The child’s question led to lively yarning sessions about what a plane needs to fly. One children suggested “a driver”, while another chimed in to say “they’re called a pilot.” Some children recognised that planes need wings to fly and compared this to a helicopter, which needs to spin to fly. One child shared, “I have been on an airplane and you need a ticket.” The children’s prior knowledge and responses highlighted a mix of practical experiences and imaginative ideas about how planes and flight work. These initial thoughts and hypotheses formed a foundation for hands-on experimentation in the project.
🧪 Experimenting
To begin, the children played with a variety of wind-powered objects — kites, wind-powered cars, parachutes, rockets, and windsocks — to investigate how air and wind affects movements and stability.
After watching videos about airplanes and flight, the children were inspired to be mini-engineers and make their own paper airplanes! Each day they refined their prototypes by experimenting with different paper airplane designs and testing performance with different throwing techniques. They documented their plane throws with video recordings. This allowed the children to watch their planes’ flight in slow-motion video playback to analyse their performance. One child observed that the planes were “using thrust to take off”, while another noted that “the planes are different because Aurora’s arm goes like this, and Kaison’s plane goes faster.”
Family and community engagement were a core part of the project. One child’s parent, who was involved in army recruitment, spoke to the children about different professions that involve flight, like drone operators and helicopter pilots. One child shared, “My drone flies and it’s got a camera; it can see a chicken and the people.” The children were also invited to conduct an experiment related to concepts of wind and flight at home with their families. They posted pictures and videos, and completed a questionnaire to document their scientific process. In show-and-tell sessions, the children presented their findings. One child shared, “We made four rockets, the number four rocket is the biggest and shoots the farthest.”
The children also posed questions to their friends at Brig-O-Doon Aged Care, such as “How does a helicopter fly?” and “How do you drive a truck?” One resident shared his experience as a former Royal Engineer, which provided valuable information that fed into the Seedling & Co Calamvale’s exploration of army roles for their ANZAC display. The children also embarked on an excursion to Archerfield Airport, which allowed the children to experience sitting in a real plane’s pilot seat and to learn about flight mechanics from Captain Paul.
QLD Winner: Excellence in Early STEM Education Awards 2024
This project was the 2024 QLD Winner of the Excellence in Early STEM Education Award as part of the Little Scientists Early STEM Education Awards. These biennial awards call upon early learning services and classrooms to nominate by submitting an inquiry-based STEM project co-developed with their children 0-8 years. Projects were judged on originality, STEM content, alignment to the inquiry cycle, child-led approach, and use of a gender lens.