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Comment by davidw | Hacker News Reader

I would have won a paper airplane contest in elementary school if the teacher hadn't been lame about it. The rules were to build a paper airplane with paper clips, paper and tape. Clearly, most of the kids were going to build silly airplanes that barely flew, with the best sticking to more or less standard designs that still wouldn't go all that far. My design was very simple: wad a lot of paperclips up into a compact ball and wrap it with paper and tape. I knew I could hurl it a lot farther than even the viable plane designs would go, because I could sink way more energy into propelling it. It was clearly superior, so the teacher disallowed it:-/

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It seems thinking outside the box isn't encouraged in schools. Is this because schools (especially schools for children) are more about socialization than they are for learning?

Step back a moment and ask yourself if the anecdote is really a case of a student not playing by implied rules. The teacher most likely had an idea of what they wanted to see students do but failed to make it clear. This was effectively a competition and, as is usual with competition, it's nice to have all competitors on the same ground.

Both sides have a point. I think a good teacher would have indeed separated this unusual entry from the main competition, because the other kids would have reasonably felt cheated by competing against something that's more a ball than an airplane. On the other hand, it's a clever hack, and deserves some acknowledgement. The appropriate acknowledgement depends on the kid; I know that if I did something like that, I'd probably either have some mischief up my sleeve or just want to disengage from the task as quickly as possible. The best way to have dealt with me, then, would be to acknowledge that I've got a clever trick, but that with all my spare time I should really construct something that has wings and flies, in the (implicit) spirit of the event.

It seems that when you're asked for a plane, you're expected to create a plane, not a wad of paper.

Presumably, this was during a unit on areodynamics, and the idea was to demonstrate an understanding of areodynamics, and not to show that you can throw balls farther than you can throw planes.

If the teacher had asked for the object that would go farthest, instead of specifically asking for a paper plane, then you would have a point.

1. There were no rules on what the 'plane' was supposed to look like. Creativity was encouraged and normally rewarded in this class (I liked the teacher a lot, actually, and was irked also because it was out of character for her to forbid thinking outside the box).

2. It wasn't during a unit on aerodynamics, and in any case, "the motion of air, particularly when it interacts with a moving object" is quite relevant to wads of paper, meteorites, missiles, arrows, helicopters, and various other objects that are not airplanes. It might have been a good opportunity to explore why something like my wad of paper would go farther than most planes, as well as the relative real world advantages of different things.

I have a similar anecdote from a summer camp as a kid. We were asked to build a tower from various materials. Points were given for the height of the tower, and subtracted for arbitrary "costs" of different materials (eg. a role of tape may cost 100 points).

I immediately realized that the costs worked in such a way that it was infeasible to build anything and come out positive, so I convinced my team to not build anything while we watched other teams go into the negative, while we calculating their debts.

It worked great until the teacher caught on and adjusted the prices so that it was cost-effective to build.

Cool, but the rules were broken. I could add this missing rule: the plan should be able to go forward for at least one meter even if no force is applied to it but just released from an height of 2 meters. Well the two costants may need some tuning.

I had a similar contest in school where I used a trick that I had learned just by goofing around with paper planes as a kid...

You take the classic paper airplane fold and simply do a double inner fold... so crease in 2x before building the wings. You basically end up with a dart that can easily fly across a gymnasium and farther depending on how hard it's hurled.

I remember some kid using that design and flying it pretty far, but my darts (er, planes) were hitting high on the back wall of the gym with plenty of distance to go.

That style of plane is best for speed and accuracy. A plane built to glide will travel farther. I used to invent paper airplanes as a kid, and I found that ones beginning with the cross-folds (more likely to balance) and broad wings yielded the best results.

Maybe the dart style planes can handle a bit more thrust?

Sounds like the teacher should have set a limit on the number of paperclips, the amount of tape, and the size of the paper. In real life, there's no such thing as an infinite resource. :)

That said, I'm just being silly. It's school. All of its rules are arbitrary.

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