We made the video posted below to give you a few ideas of how you can use your balloon-powered helicopter as a teaching aid in your classroom for your lower primary students.
You can get a sharpie pen, draw a counter on the balloon, go outside, fly your helicopter, and then ask your young people to draw a map of the school of what they think the helicopter saw as it flew over in the upper primary years or even in high school.
You might like to try and get some different size balloons, some different shape balloons. Then using the stopwatch on your phone, you can see how the different size or shape affects the flight time of your balloon helicopter.
If you look closely at your helicopter side on, you will notice that the rotor blades are at an angle. This is what we call the pitch angle. What you might like to do is use a dob of hot glue and some tape to secure the blades at a flatter angle and ask your students to observe whether that makes a difference to its flight characteristics.
Every aeroplane or helicopter, big or small, has what pilots refer to as the maximum take-off weight. You can determine the maximum take-off weight of your helicopter. Simply sticky tape some streamers to the balloon and you can keep adding streamers to see how many you need to add before your helicopter won’t climb anymore.
If you feel like challenging the students, just hand them your helicopter and see if they can figure out how it works. It’s what we call a tip jet rotor. The leading edge of the blade is hollow, so the air from the balloon is directed down to a tiny little hole you see at the tip of the blade. The air blows backwards, the blade blows forward. It’s Isaac Newton’s third law. For every action, there’s an equal and opposite reaction. To demonstrate how the tip jet works, just get some confetti or lightweight pom poms and get the students to try and blow them around with the jet tip.
If your students are in a bit of a silly mood and they just want to try something different, tell them to see how it flies with the blade taken off.
You’ll find the harder it is to blow up your balloon, the better your helicopter will fly.
Don’t worry if it lands in the tree or in the roof of your classroom, send me an email and I’ll happily send you a new helicopter free of charge.
If you really want to get your young people excited about aviation, I can deliver a flying STEM workshop for your primary school students or I can be an assembly guest speaker for your secondaries. Send a message on the contact form.
