My Maker Project
Recently I have been fiddling around with paper airplanes in my physics two class.My goal is to impress my teacher’s assistant by making an airplane that would fly as far as it possibly could. Needless to say, without any instruction my planes were subpar. When I received the news that i would need to learn how to make something for my digital culture class, I realized that this was the perfect opportunity to learn how to make the paper airplane to defeat all others. To start, I scoured the internet and came across a site called, “artofmanliness.com”.This site claimed to know how to make the World’s best paper airplanes. I looked at a few names and came across “The Hammer”. I knew right then and there that this paper airplane was going to be successful. Due to this, I went along with the instructions and created my version of “The Hammer”. My final product looked like the pictures that were given in the instructions. When I went to test it I was not disappointed. This paper airplane flew farther than any of the ones I made in my physics two class.
The instructions were quite interesting. The instructions targeted males, mainly males that are fathers or strive to be fathers in the near future. This is indicated in a short introduction before the paper airplane instructions began where Jeremy Anderberg, the author, states, “there are many skills fathers should pass on to their children: how to ride a bike, how to skip a stone, and of course, how to make a paper airplane.” It’s clearly steered toward older men but these instructions are for a paper airplane, so anyone can use them. Once I got past the introduction I jumped right into the instructions and this plane was a little complicated to make so I was hoping for clear instructions. I did a quick glance over and saw that there were lots of pictures but often times the pictures weren’t labeled clearly so I would get confused on which instruction is talking about which picture which threw me off and made my paper airplane making experience a little less pleasant. I carried on as I did figure it out. My paper airplane was slowly taking shape. Another complaint that I had was that sometimes the lighting in the picture was too dim and it was too difficult to see the creases. Other times the person who took the pictures will put his hand on the plane further blocking my view. Although he did have a nice black ring on his hand. Lastly the pictures sometimes were a bit blurry making it even harder to follow along. Any instructions I would change would be be related to the pictures. I would label the pictures by number so it’s easier to follow and I would try to take pictures of better quality as to further illustrate the instructions.
Despite these difficulties, I successfully finished my paper airplane. I managed to follow the instructions so that my paper airplane looks exactly like the one in the instructions. There were a lot of folds in this paper airplane so it was difficult to create a perfectly symmetrical airplane but my version of “The Hammer” will do the job. It flies good too. Maybe now my teacher’s assistant will be proud of me because I can fold a halfway decent paper airplane.
Link to instructions: http://www.artofmanliness.com/2014/09/16/how-to-make-the-worlds-best-paper-airplanes/
