Two Paper Airplane Design Challenges: Customizing for Different Learning Objectives

The incorporation of scientific inquiry into college classrooms has steadily risen as faculty work to move away from exclusively didactic methods. One type of inquiry structure, the design task, produces a product rather than simply a conclusion. This offers students a context to apply their understanding of content in a tangible way that has particular appeal for the nontraditional student. This paper describes two examples of how a common, underlying design task--designing a paper airplane--was modified to meet the needs of two very different college science courses. Each had distinct curricular goals and populations of science students: a teacher education course for K-8 inservice teachers and a physics content course for nontraditional college students. The differences resulted in different pedagogical choices in the details of the activity. These cases serve to illustrate both important considerations in the design of this type of inquiry activity--design challenges--and how such activities can be used to meet differing educational goals. (Contains 4 figures and 1 table.)