Today from Bedtime Math: Gargantuan Paper Airplane

Try this fun math challenge with your kids! 

It always feels good to fold a piece of paper into a triangle, hurl it into the air and watch it sail across the room like a real airplane. So you can imagine the excitement if that paper plane is 45 feet long. A group made a giant paper plane that size from an 800-pound sheet of paper, and used a helicopter to pull it high into the sky. They also strapped a camera to it, so when they cut the cord, the camera took video of the plane's amazing flight through the sky - and its crash. As we see in the film, all good things come to an end, at least for this paper airplane...but hopefully this won't be the last house-sized piece of paper to fly. 

Now here's today's fun flight math~

Wee ones: If this plane flew at 3,000 feet high and an eagle flew through there at 4,000 feet, which one flew higher?

Little kids: The paper weighed 800 pounds! If the helicopter could lift only 100 pounds more than that, how heavy a plane could it have lifted?  Bonus: If the plane weighed 800 pounds and the camera weighed 10 pounds, how much did they weigh together?

Big kids: To get a sense of this plane's size, a car is about 15 feet long. How many cars long was the plane?  Bonus: At around 1:16 into the video, the camera catches the helicopter whirring high above the paper airplane. If the plane was 2,100 feet off the ground and the chopper was 4 times as high, how high was the chopper flying?

 

 

 

 

 

Answers:

Wee ones: The Eagle flew higher.

Little kids: 900 pounds.  Bonus: 810 pounds.

Big kids: 3 cars long.  Bonus: 8,400 feet.