Hovercraft Recycling Project for Kids

This hovercraft recycling project for kids is sure to be a fun way for kids to experience physics! Kids love watching things fly and they love watching things drop and fall too. Let’s take that natural interest and introduce some physics concepts and recycle some old CDs (and other materials!) in the process!

This recycling project for kids creates a super simple (yet fascinating!) hovercraft and it can be played with for hours!

How To Build Your Hovercraft Recycling Project for Kids

Do you remember CDs? I’m old school and drive a car that still has a CD player but I’m well aware plenty of kids don’t even know what they are!  Streaming or downloading music is a way more common thing! Anyways, what do we do with all the CDs sitting around collecting dust? We design a recycling project for kids- in this case a DIY Hovercraft!

You’ll only need a few supplies:

• • An old CD
  • Hot glue gun + glue
  • Lid from dish soap (any squeeze lid would work)
  • Balloon 

 

1. Hot glue the lid to the center of the CD. We used a lid from an empty dish soap bottle! Double recycling points!
2. Once the lid is glued on and completely dry, take it outside with a balloon. Blow it up and put it around the dish soap lid and watch what happens!

Using Your Hovercraft Recycling Project for Kids

Those recycled pieces of garbage are now a HOVERCRAFT and are going to start floating across the ground and moving around! It’s CRAZY!

It will be super simple to repeat the process. Get creative and try it in a bunch of different ways:

• Start on the top of a hill! This gives the hovercraft extra momentum to be able to go down the hill farther and faster!
• Try dropping it off of a higher location, maybe from the top of playground.
• We also tried across a table, across a puddle and on the grass. You can try anything! 

Talk about the results with your kids! Drop a ball from the same areas and talk about the differences between the ball and the hovercraft. 

The Science Behind This Recycled Hovercraft

This project is a great way to introduce your kids to some scientific phrases that sometimes people think are best saved for older grade level science classrooms. I say start ’em young!

The Law of Inertia is Newton’s first law. Tell it to your kiddos! It says that an object will stay still, not moving, until an outside force moves it. The same goes for an object in motion. It will stay in motion until something stops it.

In this case, the object (the hovercraft) is stopped and will remain stopped until the outside force (air in the balloon) moves it. Super cool! 

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• Very Simple Apple Volcano Science Experiment
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• Teaching Knife Skills to Kids

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