Making a Handkerchief Parachute – Kids Science Experiment

This experiment lets you develop a parachute of your own. It may not be good enough to take the weight of the kids but will help to demonstrate the principles behind a parachute.

Requirements

A big handkerchief which is not torn at any place

4 strings of strong thread

A small weight probably in the shape of a toy person (otherwise a simple weight would do)

Procedure

Take each corner of the handkerchief one by one and tie one end of a thread to it securely. Tie the other end to the weight or the toy-man.

Repeat the same for all the remaining three corners.

Just ensure that when you hold the handkerchief from the mid point, the length of all threads should be approximately the same so that it does not affect the performance of the parachute.

Just stand in open ground, fold the handkerchief over the weight and hurl it with full force to as much height as you can with all your might.

If everything works fine, the weight will come down slowly as if floating in the air, rather than abruptly falling down under gravity.

The science behind this phenomenon is very simple. When an object moves through air it experiences resistance to its motion. This resistance depends on a lot of factors including the surface area of the object exposed to the atmosphere. This is exactly the reason why cars and other fast moving vehicles are given streamline shape so that air resistance is reduced to minimum possible level.

So when the weight goes up and as it starts to fall down, the bulky weight would fall ahead of the light handkerchief which would get inflated with air as shown in figure 1 below. Since now the handkerchief is not folded any more but fully spread out, its surface area is increased which causes a lot of resistance to its downward motion. At the same time, the weight of the object is acting downward including the weight of the handkerchief (however small). Hence now the parachute slowly floats down rather than dropping immediately if only the weight were present.