Head on over to Fold ‘N Fly for a huge catalogue of paper airplane designs, from the classic Basic Dart to the gnarly Tailed Plane and the acrobatic Origami Plane.
Learn how John Collins folded his world record paper airplanes!
Adafruit’s own Dano Wall has a great paper airplane launcher project over in the Adafruit Learn System:
The science of paper airplane folding is a great way to learn about flight. This guide takes you through the process of building a motorized paper airplane launching platform. This can be used for fun, or as a standardized way to test different airplane designs.
If you are looking for something a little more complicated – check out UFunk’s incredible tutorial for folding an origami X-wing spaceship from Star Wars! See the full tutorial!
From Scientific American, here’s a project to make a particularly odd looping design: the flying hoopster!
Paper airplanes are fun to make and fly. Most designs resemble miniature planes—made of folded paper, with wings, stabilizers and sometimes even flaps. These creations look like they are ready to soar. There are some designs, like the one you can try in this activity, however, that look so awkward one might imagine they would not fly at all. Find out if it will really soar!
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Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell is every Wednesday at 7pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat – we’ll post the link there.
