Parachute Experiment for Kids: Does Heavier Fall Faster?

Ask a class whether heavy things fall faster and a confident chorus says no, Galileo settled it. Then hang two different weights under identical parachutes, and the heavy one lands first, every time, by a clear margin.

Both answers are right, and this parachute experiment for kids is the cleanest way I know to show a child that the correct answer to a physics question sometimes depends on which forces you are allowed to ignore.

Key Takeaways

• You will build four identical parachutes, hang different weights under them, and time the descent.
• The concept is terminal velocity: when drag equals weight, the fall stops speeding up.
• Best for ages 6 to 12. The building suits any age; the square-root relationship lands around 11.
• The design detail that matters: the canopy has to be open before you let go.
• Timing is the hard part. A handheld stopwatch has about 0.2 s of error, so make the fall last at least two seconds.

What You’ll Need

Item	How much	Where to get it	If you don’t have it
Thin plastic bin bags	2	Kitchen cupboard	Thin tissue paper, which tears more easily but works
Ruler and scissors	1 each	Drawer	Any scissors; the ruler is not optional because sizes must match
String or thin cord	5 m	Drawer	Sewing thread doubled over
Metal washers, all identical	16	Hardware shop, sold by weight	Identical coins, taped in stacks
Small plastic bag or tape	1	Kitchen	Tape the washers directly into a bundle
Paper clips	4	Desk	Tie the strings together instead
Stopwatch	1	Any phone	Slow-motion video, which is considerably better
Tape measure	1	Toolbox	A marked string
Step ladder or stairwell landing	1	Home	Any safe spot giving 2.5 m or more of clear drop
Notebook	1	Anywhere	Five times per condition means 40 numbers; write them down

Time: prep 10 min, building 25 min, experiment 40 min, cleanup 5 min Cost: a bag of washers; everything else is probably in the house Mess level: low

Do the Experiment

Step 1 — Cut four identical canopies

Measure and cut four 30 cm squares of bin-bag plastic. Identical means identical: a 2 cm difference in side length changes the area by 14 percent and will show up in your results as a mystery. Cut a small hole at each corner and reinforce it with a square of tape.

Step 2 — Rig the lines

Cut sixteen 30 cm lengths of string. Tape one to each corner hole, four per canopy, and gather the four ends of each canopy onto a paper clip. Check all four lines are the same length by holding the clip up and letting the canopy hang; if one side sags, the chute will slide sideways instead of descending.

Step 3 — Build four different payloads

Make bundles of 1, 2, 4 and 8 washers, taped tightly so nothing rattles. Weigh them if you have a scale, or just count washers and treat one washer as your unit. Hook one bundle to each parachute.

Step 4 — Measure your drop height and set the rules

Measure from the release point to the floor and write it down. The releaser stands on the ladder or the landing; the timer stands on the floor with the stopwatch. Start the watch on the word “go” from the releaser, not on seeing movement, because reaction time is smaller that way.

Step 5 — Hold the canopy open and release cleanly

Pinch the centre of the canopy, let the payload hang straight below, and drop by opening your fingers. Do not throw and do not drop it crumpled: an unopened canopy spends the first metre as a streamer and your time is then measuring the opening, not the descent. Five drops per parachute.

Step 6 — Then change the canopy instead

Now rebuild with four canopies of 15, 20, 30 and 40 cm per side, all carrying two washers. Five drops each. You have now varied the two things that matter, one at a time, and you have 40 timings.

What you should see: the one-washer chute drifts down and may sway or slide sideways. The eight-washer chute comes down noticeably faster and straighter. Divide your drop height by each average time to get a speed, and the pattern should be that four times the weight gives roughly twice the speed, not four times. On the canopy side, four times the area gives roughly half the speed. Expect messy numbers for the fast drops, which is a result in itself.

What’s Actually Going On

A falling object has two forces on it: its weight pulling down and aerodynamic drag pushing back. Drag grows with the square of the speed and depends on the shape, the air density and the frontal area, which NASA writes as drag equals the drag coefficient times density times velocity squared times area, all divided by two (NASA Glenn on the drag equation).

As a parachute speeds up, drag climbs fast. At some speed drag equals weight, the net force becomes zero, and by Newton’s first law the object stops accelerating and falls at a constant speed. That speed is the terminal velocity (NASA Glenn on terminal velocity). Set drag equal to weight, rearrange, and the terminal velocity comes out proportional to the square root of weight divided by area.

That square root is the whole answer to the title question. Yes, a heavier load under the same canopy falls faster. Four times the weight needs four times the drag to balance it, and because drag goes as speed squared, you only need to double the speed to get four times the drag. So weight matters, but gently. Double the load and you fall about 1.4 times faster, not twice as fast.

Now the Galileo part, which deserves care rather than a slogan. Galileo’s result is that in the absence of air resistance, all objects fall with the same acceleration regardless of mass. That is exactly true, and it is why a hammer and a feather hit the lunar surface together. But “no air resistance” is a condition, not a universal licence. For a dense compact object dropped a couple of metres, drag is tiny compared with weight and the condition nearly holds, so a marble and a cannonball do land together. For a parachute, drag is the dominant force by design, and in that regime mass absolutely changes the outcome (NASA Glenn on falling with air resistance).

Teaching this as “heavier things don’t fall faster” full stop is a well-meaning overcorrection. It leaves a child unable to explain a parachute, a feather, a leaf or a hailstone, and it teaches that physics rules are magic words rather than statements with conditions attached. The more useful version is: the acceleration of a falling body is the same for everything only while drag is negligible, and you should always ask whether it is.

One more detail your results will show. The lightest payload often sways from side to side or glides away rather than falling straight. A parachute descending at low speed sheds vortices off the canopy rim alternately on each side, and with too little weight to stabilise it the canopy rocks. Real parachutes have a hole in the middle, called a spill hole, partly to stop exactly that.

How to Explain It to Your Kid

Ages 5–8: The air has to hold up the weight

Hold a sheet of paper flat and push it down through the air, then do the same with the sheet turned edge-on. The flat one is much harder to push, which is the air pushing back. Then say the parachute has to hold up whatever is hanging underneath, and if there is more to hold up, it has to be pushed harder, which means going faster.

Ages 9–12: Drag grows with speed, so there is a balance point

Explain that drag is small when you are slow and big when you are fast, so a falling thing speeds up until the air is pushing as hard as gravity is pulling, and then it stops speeding up. Ask them to predict, before testing, whether four washers will fall twice as fast as one or four times as fast. Most say four times. The answer is twice, and the reason is that drag depends on speed squared.

Ages 13+: Derive the square root and test it

Set drag equal to weight, with drag as half the density times the drag coefficient times area times velocity squared. Rearrange for velocity. Terminal speed goes as the square root of weight over area. Then test it properly: plot speed squared against number of washers and look for a straight line through the origin. That graph is a genuine test of a derived law using a bin bag and a stopwatch.

The question to ask: “If we did this on the Moon, which parachute would land first?” (They would land together, because there is no air, so no drag, so no terminal velocity, and the parachute does nothing at all. It is the cleanest way to check whether they understand that the condition, not the mass, is what changed.)

Why Teaching This Early Pays Off

The payoff here is a habit of mind rather than a fact: asking under what conditions a rule applies. Children are taught a lot of physics as unconditional statements, and the ones who go furthest are usually the ones who start asking what each statement assumes. A parachute and a bag of washers makes that question concrete at an age where the abstract version would mean nothing.

It also replaces a wrong idea with a correct structure rather than another wrong idea. The intuition that heavy things fall faster comes from everyday experience with leaves, paper and feathers, where it is true. Telling a child that intuition is simply wrong discards information they correctly observed. Telling them it is right in one regime and wrong in another keeps the observation and adds the condition.

For the teaching itself, the research points at explanation rather than activity. Chi and Wylie’s ICAP framework ranks interactive and constructive engagement, where a learner explains, elaborates or argues, above merely doing an activity or watching one (Chi & Wylie, 2014). The useful part of this afternoon is making your kid predict the four-washer result and then explain why they were wrong. The National Research Council framework places that kind of reasoning from evidence among the core practices of school science (NRC, 2012).

If this holds their interest, our guides to paper planes as a real experiment and to building kites and wind science use the same drag ideas.

Before You Start: What Parents Should Know

Best age	6 to 12. Younger children can cut, tape and drop; the graph work starts around 11
Supervision	An adult on the ladder or the landing, always. The child times from the floor, standing clear of the landing zone
Real hazards	Falls from height, not parachutes. Also thin plastic sheet, which is a suffocation hazard for toddlers, and small metal washers, which are a choking hazard under three
Don’t	Don’t drop from a balcony, a window or over a stair rail into a void. You cannot see the landing area, the wind moves a light parachute several metres, and a washer bundle falling two floors is dangerous

Use a step ladder on level ground with an adult on it, or stand on a stairwell landing and drop onto the same landing. Two and a half metres is enough height for a good measurement. Collect the washers at the end and count them, because loose hardware on a floor is exactly the hazard you do not want for a toddler.

When It Doesn’t Work

The canopy never opens and the whole thing plummets. You dropped it crumpled. Pinch the centre of the canopy so it hangs open like an umbrella, with the payload dangling, then release. If it still collapses, your plastic is too heavy; switch to a thinner bag.

The chute glides sideways and lands metres away. Either the lines are unequal or the payload is too light. Hang it up and check all four lines; then add a washer. Sideways glide also means your timed fall is not a vertical fall, so the numbers are not comparable.

Times for the heavy payloads are all over the place. You have hit the limit of a handheld stopwatch. A 0.8 second fall timed by hand carries roughly 25 percent error. Fix it by increasing the drop height, using a bigger canopy so everything falls slower, or filming at high frame rate and counting frames.

Results differ between the hallway and the stairwell. Air currents. A stairwell has a draught up or down it, and an open window creates one too. Pick one location, close the doors, and do all your drops in the same place on the same afternoon.

The canopy tears at the corners. Reinforce each hole with tape on both sides before threading the string, and use a hole punch rather than scissor points. Bin-bag plastic tears from any nick.

Take It Further With This Parachute Experiment for Kids

Test the square-root law. Use payloads of 1, 4, 9 and 16 washers, which should give speeds in the ratio 1, 2, 3 and 4. Even better, plot speed squared against number of washers, which should be a straight line through the origin. A straight line there is strong evidence that drag goes as speed squared, which is not obvious and not something most adults have ever verified.

Vary the canopy, hold the load. With two washers, test canopies of 15, 20, 30 and 40 cm per side. Terminal speed should go as one over the square root of the area. Doubling the side length quadruples the area and should halve the speed, which is a satisfyingly big effect to measure.

Add a spill hole. Cut a 3 cm hole in the centre of one 30 cm canopy and compare it with an identical one without. Measure both the descent time and how far off target it lands over five drops. The holed canopy usually falls slightly faster and lands much closer to straight down, which is the trade-off real designers accept.

What to Watch For Over the Next 3 Months

• Week 4: Your kid uses the phrase “it depends on the air” when something falls oddly, instead of asserting a rule.
• Month 2: They connect it to something else, often why a feather falls slowly or why hailstones can be dangerous. A large hailstone falls fast for exactly the weight-over-area reason you measured.
• Month 3: They ask what happens to a parachute at high altitude. It falls faster, because the air is thinner, and real high-altitude drop zones use larger canopies for that reason.

Frequently Asked Questions

So does a heavier object fall faster or not?

Under a parachute, yes, and the speed rises as the square root of the weight. In a vacuum, no, everything accelerates identically. Without a parachute but over a short drop with a dense object, drag is too small to matter and heavy and light land together. The rule depends on whether drag is significant, which is the point of the experiment.

Why is the relationship a square root instead of straight proportion?

Because drag grows with the square of speed. To double the drag force you only need to go about 1.4 times faster, so a doubled weight needs a 1.4 times higher speed to balance it. The square in the drag law becomes a square root in the answer.

How do we time the fall accurately?

Make the fall last longer. Increase the drop height, or use a larger canopy so everything descends more slowly, and keep the drop above two seconds. If you can, film at 120 or 240 frames per second and count frames, which cuts the timing error to a few hundredths of a second.

What size should the parachute be?

A 30 cm square with a payload of about 10 g gives a descent of roughly two seconds from 2.5 m, which is comfortable to time. Scale the canopy up if your payload is heavier. The ratio of weight to canopy area is what sets the speed, so those two numbers should be chosen together.

Can we use a plastic shopping bag instead of a bin bag?

Yes, if it is thin and you can cut flat squares from it. Avoid thick or crinkly plastic, which will not open reliably. What matters most is that all four canopies in a comparison come from the same bag, so the material is identical.

---

About the author

Ricky Flores is the founder of HiWave Makers and an electrical engineer with 15+ years of experience building consumer technology at Apple, Samsung, and Texas Instruments. He writes about how kids learn to build, think, and create in a tech-saturated world. Read more at hiwavemakers.com.

---

Sources

1. NASA Glenn Research Center. “Terminal Velocity.” Beginner’s Guide to Aeronautics. https://www1.grc.nasa.gov/beginners-guide-to-aeronautics/termvel/
2. NASA Glenn Research Center. “The Drag Equation.” Beginner’s Guide to Aeronautics. https://www1.grc.nasa.gov/beginners-guide-to-aeronautics/drag-equation/
3. NASA Glenn Research Center. “Falling Object with Air Resistance.” Beginner’s Guide to Aeronautics. https://www1.grc.nasa.gov/beginners-guide-to-aeronautics/falling-object-with-air-resistance/
4. NASA Glenn Research Center. “Free Fall without Air Resistance.” Beginner’s Guide to Aeronautics. https://www1.grc.nasa.gov/beginners-guide-to-aeronautics/free-fall-without-air-resistance/
5. Chi, M. T. H., & Wylie, R. (2014). “The ICAP Framework: Linking Cognitive Engagement to Active Learning Outcomes.” Educational Psychologist, 49(4), 219–243. https://doi.org/10.1080/00461520.2014.965823
6. National Research Council. (2012). A Framework for K-12 Science Education. National Academies Press. https://doi.org/10.17226/13165
7. Champagne, A. B., Klopfer, L. E., & Anderson, J. H. (1980). “Factors influencing the learning of classical mechanics.” American Journal of Physics, 48(12), 1074–1079. https://doi.org/10.1119/1.12290