A 17-year-old Rancho Santa Fe student pilot has launched a free program that uses paper airplanes to teach math to preschoolers and first-graders across San Diego County.

Lucy Bachrack, a senior at The Grauer School in Encinitas, created Math Wings after years of tutoring peers who saw no practical use for the subject, as first reported by the San Diego Union-Tribune. She decided younger students would be more open to changing that mindset.

Each Math Wings session runs 45 minutes. Bachrack reads picture books, tells stories from her time in the cockpit and opens her flight bag for the class. Inside: a headset, sunglasses, paper maps, a logbook and tools for measuring flight.

Then the kids build.

Each student folds a paper airplane, assigns it a call sign and launches it down a makeshift runway. The students measure how far each plane travels in inches and calculate the average distance among their classmates' aircraft.

Bachrack has led seven workshops at schools including La Costa Valley Preschool & Kindergarten in Carlsbad, Village Gate Children's Academy in Encinitas and Temple Solel Early Childhood Center in Cardiff. Nearly 150 paper airplanes have taken flight across those sessions.

Donna Goldschlag, a teacher at Temple Solel, told the Union-Tribune that Bachrack "left every child with a toy airplane and the inspiration and belief that one day they may become pilots too."

The aviation side of the program draws on real experience. Bachrack has logged more than 100 flight hours out of McClellan-Palomar Airport in Carlsbad, where she is a member of Pacific Coast Flyers. She took her first flying lesson at 15 and is now preparing for her checkride, the final test to earn a pilot's license. Her longest recorded flight covers a 3.5-hour loop from Palomar Airport to Torrance, then San Bernardino, then back to Carlsbad.

"A lot of students complained that it was hard and didn't see any practical use of the subject," Bachrack told the Union-Tribune about the high schoolers she tutored before starting Math Wings.

At The Grauer School, which enrolls about 160 students, Bachrack competes in Science Olympiad and mathematical modeling contests. She has been tutoring classmates in math since elementary school and plans to study STEM in college next year.

Schools and groups in the San Diego area can request a free classroom visit or download lesson plans at mathwings.org.

Upcoming community events

The Rancho Santa Fe Historical Society hosts a talk by Dick Clotfelter on Thursday, Oct. 15.