[agumonkey]

parts of my brain lit up just remember the feeling of paper again my fingers while folding creases in primary school.

it's super cool to see his semi physical approach between momentum/lift etc. Makes me wonder how much you could get by adding a few bits of metal/rubber in the design (even minuscule but functional bits)

Also youtube has a lot of paper plane competitions in Japan. Fun to watch, less explanations(npi) but some involved fluid dynamics ground effect.

[2muchcoffeeman]

I am sure most kids figured this out.

I used to add a small paper clip to the nose of my planes. I also used to have these cheap styrofoam planes where you punched the parts out of a sheet and slotted them together. Those had plastic push on noses.

I never thought much about my designs but thinking back the behaviour makes so much sense now.

[agumonkey]

We used to weigh the nose up too, but without thinking about center of gravity and oscillation. We were 6yo it wasn't very clear what was going on for us even though I find it interesting that:

- we could iterate hundreds of time with joy - it seems like a stupid kid thing but it's quite subtle and technical, if approached so

Kids have this pseudo researcher mindset that only lacks a few symbolic notions to really leap across toying to understanding.

[newnewpdro]

Used staples in mine... would keep adding more until it flew in a balanced fashion, also helped keep tight the fold-heavy front.