The delight of flight. A small engineering experiment using air pressure to launch your spaceship into the stratosphere!

• Cut a pair of matching paper sides for your space craft.
• Glue a toothpick between the 2 sides (taking care that to leave a pocket for the straw to be inserted later – as shown in the image below).
• Let the glue dry and decorate your space craft.

Now for the launch!

• Take the spaceship and place it on a bent straw (toothpick in straw, paper on outside of straw)
• Count down 10 – 9 – 8 – 7 – 6 – 5 – 4 – 3 – 2 – 1…. BLAST OFF!
• Take a deep breath and launch with a short sharp blow!

Watch as the children shrill with excitement, and dash to make some more. My own offspring wanted to see what shapes would fly best (circle spaceships, square ones etc.) we then measured the flight height against a wall (building on an understanding of numeracy as well as introducing the idea of a controlled test.)

For those more ready for a true investigation into air pressure try different sized straws and see how that effects the air pressure.