rAs Kids🍃 🔃 ⬇️ ✋✋✋✋
🎒 What you need
- paper and scissors
- a paperclip, small stone or bit of clay for weight
- somewhere high but safe to drop from, like standing on a step
✋ Do this
- Cut a strip of paper. Cut a slit down the middle at the top and fold the two flaps in opposite directions. Clip a weight at the bottom.
- Drop it from as high as you can safely reach. It spins as it falls — point at the spin. Bent blades turn falling into turning.
- Now bend both flaps the SAME way and drop it. It flutters and drops. The slant is what makes the spin.
- Make a second spinner with the flaps bent the other way. Drop both together and watch them spin in opposite directions.
- Hold your two spinners side by side, then imagine two more. That square of four is exactly how a quadcopter is built.
- Blow steadily on one flap and watch the whole thing turn. Air on a slanted blade always becomes turning — or the other way round, turning becomes moving air.
💡 Why it works
A drone propeller is that same slanted blade, just driven by a motor instead of by falling. As it spins it scoops air and flings it downwards, and the air pushes the drone up. A quadcopter has four of them so it can push harder on one side than the other and lean where it wants to go.
🔥 Challenge
Change one thing — longer blades, heavier weight, wider flaps — and see if you can double how many spins it makes on the way down. Count them.
📖 New words
propellera spinning slanted blade that pushes air
quadcoptera flying machine with four propellers
🔃
Prop Spinner
Tap when you have finished this module.