Science Fair

This was Tristen's first year to participate in the Science Fair. He picked out what he wanted to do in December before Winter Break. He wanted to figure out what paper airplane design would fly the farthest. Tristen loves to make paper airplanes. I don't know how many I throw away every day. This was a great area for him. He has books with different designs as well as a daily calendar that he can make a new airplane everyday.

For his class the project had a strict timeline of when things would be due. I'm guessing that this was so we wouldn't procrastinate until the night before the whole project was due to rush and get it all done. The only problem with that is that we were still rushing to get the smaller assignments done the night before they were due. Like all the research, graphs, rough draft, etc. Procrastination is something that comes very easily to Tristen (and Hans and I). We finally got around to actually doing the experiment the night before the results were due. Hans helped Tristen build a launcher out of a piece of our wood flooring, some nails, and a large rubber band. The launcher was needed after all to make sure that the same force was behind every launch. Tristen also picked out 3 of the planes from him daily airplane calendar for the experiment.We would launch them and Tristen had to mark where they first landed.He did a good job coming up with ideas of how to do things and then writing up the report - with some help from Mom and Dad. Then we were back at the procrastinating and the night before he had to take in the display board we finally started working on it. We got everything sized and printed and then Tristen went off to bed while I stayed up past midnight gluing everything to the board. I'm glad that it is all done! Now we'll have to start Makayla's project next week. At least hers isn't so structured.