Paper Airplane Contest

We held the first-ever paper airplane contest in Luang Prabang! A poster was taped to the door and a 1 meter paper airplane was hung from the ceiling to advertise. About 20 kids showed up of which there was one girl, a couple of university students, and a handful of novice monks. Several kids had never made a paper airplane before!

The first paper airplane was named "Laos Airlines" and was a simple airplane with which some of the kids were familiar. The idea was to get over shyness and relax into a new learning environment. The first experiment was put a paper clip on the back or the front of the airplane and see what happens. The next experiment was to cut flaps into wings and tail of the plane and see what happens. Planes were flying every direction! I had typed up several airplane instruction sheets with names like Sua-Tiger to encourage different designs.

Next were the contests, the categories to be judged were: distance, speed, flight accuracy, landing accuracy, and the completely open-ended creativity category. The kids really got into building a plane to win the contests. There were prizes at stake! After the ensuing madness, a prize of two notebooks and two pens were awarded to each winner.

Getting kids past their shyness with foreigners and a new style of learning was easy. Language was the real barrier for me but I had my mad scientist assistant, Soulisuck, translate all the difficult concepts to Laos language. Getting kids to think on their own and be creative will be the ongoing challenge.

Carol, Alan, Linda, and Derin were the judges for the contests. Thanks for helping out, I hope you had as much fun as I did!