Parachutes

In another of our science projects, we discovered the art of making parachutes on Saturday. For this project, we cut parachutes out of pieces of paper and then dropped them from off of my play structure. We kept a stopwatch and a notepad to time how long each took to fall. I thought up the idea that we should have some "controls" as well. The controls are regular pieces of paper with nothing done to them. We then replicated the results inside using a stepladder so as to take wind out of the equation. Here's what we learned:

1. The control works pretty well. It was better than all but three of our designs.
2. Circles with scalloped edges work better than glider-like shapes.
3. The wind actually made things fall faster rather than slower. (To determine this, we calculated the height from which we dropped things inside and outside. We had the time from the stopwatch, and speed is height/time).