Part of a new sub-series on the blogger brothers – cub scout pack ideas.  Tagged “cubscouts”.

Intent

A fun pack meeting.

Setup

The Paper Airplane Bonanza is a pack meeting where the kids build paper airplanes, then attempt to accrue points by landing their planes into targets.  The setup for this can be as involved as you like!  I go all out, including fans, traps and DIY electronics projects.

Simple Targets

The easiest set of targets are things like:

• Five gallon buckets turn on their side.
• Hula Hoops taped up
• Household Ladders
• Ladder Golf Ladders

Slightly More Involved Targets

The next level of interesting come from targets that are a little harder to hit:

• Air balloons on the ground
• Helium Balloons, tethered
• Electric Fan Protected Targets

All Out

You’ll notice on blogger brothers I have several raspberry PI projects.  I’ve also done a large number of Arduino fun in the past too.  For these targets, I pull in those skills for:

• Fans that randomly turn on.  Using the skills found: Raspberry PI Controlling Power through GPIO (no wifi needed)
• Using that same device, I rigged up a button “trigger” to a leaf blower.  The kids line up for a chance to try to blow airplanes out of the sky.
• Rotating Hoops.  Using a gearhead motor, and battery, Hula Hoops Turn.  Making it more difficult to get the airplane through it.

Airplanes

The most successful airplane for this type of event is the Dart style:

For which there is a lovely video:

The best paper for this, in my humble opinion, is the legal form paper like this (8.5 x 14):

Finally…

The setup is really up to you.  You can have “stations” where the kids rotate in lines, or you can have a “no mans land” where there is one line, the kids can go bananas but cannot cross the line.  This ensures that no one is hit in the eye with a plane, but it requires the parents to have safety glasses and retrieve the planes for the children.

Have fun!  Let me know if you need help with the coding or other ideas for targets.