Educators, Scout Leaders, Camp Directors,

A model hovercraft is ideal for teaching about Newton's Laws of Motion, and all that follow from them: lift, thrust, drag, friction, as well as other basic science concepts such as weight versus mass, air flow, air pressure, electrical circuits, and more!

Our kits are also designed to teach about engineering. Students learn simple engineering principles as they assemble our kits, and then, using our design-your-own-hovercraft feature, students can grapple with the inevitable tradeoffs that engineering a vehicle involves.

Finally, the design-it-yourself features of our kits allow the students to form hypothesis, create experiments, test their ideas, and make their creative ideas come to life. At some point in the design of a new kind of vehicle, it becomes unclear whether the designer is doing science, engineering, or art. The easy-to-assemble aspects of our kits kits will allow you to bring your students to this point quickly, and the design-it-yourself aspects will allow them to stay there.

Southern Illinois University recently used our kits in its "Women in Engineering" Summer Program. To see the kits in use, visit Southern Illinois University's Women in Engineering Outreach Picture Page . (Scroll down for hovercraft photos.) After the young engineers put their hovercraft kits together, they held races! Visit SIU's hovercraft video page and watch a pack of GH-1 hovercraft race down the hallway. Don't forget to turn up the sound on your computer - the sound of the students exclaiming "Wow!" says it all.

Over the last two years, more than 1,400 4th through 8th graders have assembled our hovercraft kits as they attended the University of Oklahoma's Sooner Flight Academy. Visit the Sooner Flight Academy's photo gallery to see pictures of campers at Flight Camp putting together and operating our models.

(Please note that both SIU Women-in-Engineering program and the Sooner Flight Academy used versions of our kits which were "beta test" versions. These prototypes had all-white or blue-and-white color schemes. The testing went fine, and all new customers will receive our final ready-for-public-release models which come in the blue and yellow color scheme pictured elsewhere on this site. )

Goldstein Hovercraft, LLC strongly supports education. We offer substantial educational discounts, and we will try to work out an arrangement with any interested educator who can't afford our discounted rates.

We also can offer a discount to educators (or anyone else who requires a sizable number of kits) if they are willing to receive their hovercraft parts bulk packed into one carton instead of receiving them individually wrapped. More information about our discounts will be posted here soon. In the meantime, please send requests for information on educational discounts and large group discounts via the email address: gohover "at" gohover.com

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