Paper Airplane Math

Graphing comes to life with this fun paper airplane math activity! Create, fly, collect data, and use technology for serious learning that will motivate your elementary and middle school children to love learning.

Paper Airplane Graphs

Grab some colorful paper and let your children have fun designing paper airplanes to test their awesomeness. After collecting data, your children will learn so much by creating a variety of graphs.

Target Age Range:  Upper Elementary – Middle School

Skills Covered:  measurement, record keeping, averages, graphing, technology, keyboarding, writing, art, invention

This lesson paper airplane math activity is so much fun!

1. Have your child design several different paper airplanes.

2. Give each plane a name.

3. Go outside with the planes and a measuring tape.

4. From the same spot, throw and measure each plane three times.  Note the three measurements for each plane.

5. Determine the average flight measurement of each plane.  (Add all three measurements for each plane together and divide by 3 to find the average.)

6. Use one of my favorite FREE websites, Create A Graph, to transfer the average flight of each plane to various graphs.

{Bar Graph}

{Line Graph}

{Circle Graph or Pie Graph}

The final graphs can be saved to your computer and printed.  They look so fantastic, don’t they?  Have fun playing with Create A Graph!

More Graphing Activities

I’ve had bunches of graphing fun with my children over the years.  Go grab some more ideas here!

Learn More About Living Math

Enjoy an easy to understand living math how-to book or masterclass!

Picture Books About Graphing

This post contains affiliate links.

Any time you can add a literature connection to another subject, it’s a good thing! These books can help you solidify an understanding of how to graph data and how to read the data from graphs – both important skills for math and science.