We had a great day at the U Design Camp. A reminder of your homework assignment. Bring in a 2 liter soda bottle.
Skystreak
The students built a Guillow Skystreak in the morning. Guillow sells a nice variety of balsa wood and foam airplanes. For lunch, the students (when not playing Ultimate Frisbee) played around with changing the position of the wings, which led into our afternoon discussion of pitch, yaw, rolling, and the parts of an airplane.
Cadet Airplane
They students also built a Guillow Cadet. They Cadet is a complicated airplane which takes about 3 days to build as there are periods where you need to wait for the glue to dry. The steps are complicated, and it is a good demonstration in which groups can follow directions, and can work methodically and carefully, versus those who try to finish quickly (so they can go play the flight simulator) At least three groups chopped up their fuselage into tiny piece. But those who can work well will be rewarded with Skylauncher, which is another fun Balsa wood airplane with a passenger!
The Cadet Airplane from Guillow
They also built a Whitewings Trainer. White Wings are paper airplanes on steroids. They are well engineered and usually made from a combination of Balsa Wood and Paper. When properly launched with a rubber band catapult, they can stay aloft for a few minutes. The Trainer is a nice plane because the students can adjust the camber (shape) of the wind and the dihedral angle of the wing to change the aerodynamics. We had a brief competition where they tried to hit a target with their WW Trainer. Many of the students also started to build either a WW Jet Plane or a Bi-Plane. Tomorrow we will finish building the advanced White Wings and if the weather holds out we can launch them at Lunchtime.
For the morning lab tour the students went down to Biomedical Engineering for a demonstration of the brain with Professor Xue Han.
