We had a great first day in U-Design’s Flight School.
We began the day by having every student making a paper airplanes. Although this might sound simple, the challenge is to see whose plane can stay aloft the longest time or the longest distance. The hope being that by the end of the week, as the students’ understanding of aeronautics develops, so will the performance of their planes.
We then build White Wing Racer. This are high end paper airplanes with a balsa wood core. They are designed by a professional engineer and when launched with a rubber band can stay aloft for over a minute. You can by a White Wing for about $5.
Next we build Guillow Sky Streak. Guillow is actually a local company. They are well known for selling promotional foam glider airplanes in addition to the rubber band balsa wood airplanes. Although the planes we build today are a simple 5 step kit, we will modify them as the week goes on and design our own planes.
We next began working on the Guillow Cadet Planes. This is a very complex plane which will take easily three days to build. Following the directions is critically important. Many students gloss over the directions, and will make mistakes (but we learn from our mistakes).
Morning Lab Tour to visit Professor Jason Ritt from biomedical engineering. Professor Ritt is investigating sensory perception. My own son, Alejandro is taking U Design this summer. Alejandro wanted to know if they could develop tools to create Daredevil, which by coincidence I just started watching on Netflix.
We had a few brief lectures today on the physics of Flight and basic Aerodynamics.
We had a special guess lecture today from Jeff Ventola who is the developed of the Wicked Wing Flying Thing. He is a local inventor who invented a new type of frisbee that can easily be thrown over a football field in length. I read about Jeff in the local newspaper. You can buy his flying disc online.
On the other half of U-Design, Alejandro really enjoyed himself in Robo Alley, and was excited to start learning to program in C.
