Paper Airplane Lab Report

Feasibility of Group 5’s Paper Airplane
Introduction

Purpose
The purpose of this report is to determine the feasibility of using the paper airplane created from group 5’s instructions in the Iowa State paper airplane competition.

Problem
Jackson hopes to win the annual Iowa State paper airplane competition and must determine the best paper airplane to use. The competition is judged on distance and has several rules. The average distance traveled by the winning plane over the past five years has been 6.42 meters. The airplane must also stay within a specific zone when thrown. The competitor must stand between lines on the ground that are two meters apart. After the throw the paper airplane must remain between these two lines or the throw

Five paper airplanes were built and each was tested three times, the number of attempts for a contestant in the competition. A success is when the plane lands within the competition zone, while a scratch is one that lands outside the zone and will not count as an attempt. Table 1.2 shows the results of the trials. The plane failed only three of these attempts and had an overall accuracy of 80%.

Interpretation
As Table 1.2 shows the overall accuracy of the airplane is acceptable. At an accuracy of 80% the plane exceeds the average accuracy from the previous year of 75%. This accuracy is above the acceptable range for the competition.

Landing position
Explanation
Landing position is considered an important criterion for evaluating the performance of a paper airplane. It affects the distance traveled by the paper airplane because airplanes that land with their body hitting the floor tend to travel a longer distance compared to those that hit nose first.

We count how many times they land with their body hitting the floor first or their noses first. Table 1.3 shows the result. And in Plot 1.1, it shows the distance related to each attempts.

Interpretation
From the Table 1.3, we could see that the number of times the paper airplane lands by hitting the body first is 8 times compared to the 10 times landing nose first. This difference, though small, will have a large impact during the competition. Because in Plot 1.1, the overall distance for hitting nose first landing position is smaller than the hitting body first landing position. In addition, the range of body landing distance is from 4.9m to 6.5m while the range of nose landing distance is from 3.8m to 5.8m. The variability of landing by hitting the body is less than hitting by nose landing position.

As a result, in the competition, a paper airplane will have higher chances to land by hitting the nose. However, considering there are only 4 times out of 18 times traveling distances are less than 5m, we can still conclude that this kind of paper airplane is competitive in the Iowa State paper airplane