Students today reviewed the 4 Forces of Flight, axes of motion, design of a cambered airfoil, and roles played by each of Newton's 3 Laws of Motion. They then completed their data tables through reiterative testing and modification of their glider models. Students who were able to demonstrate optimized straight-line flight began experimenting with controlled flights utilizing their elevons, rudder, and a simple "launcher" mechanism that employs stored potential energy for thrust. Students wishing to review these concepts further should explore Mr. Franklin's Flight Dynamics page, as well as this excellent resource from Boeing. (Note that the lesson originally planned for today was delayed until the following day due to the morning assembly and technical issues with syncing documents across devices.)
Students today continued the process of Iterative Design, testing their prototypes and observing their flight paths in terms of pitch, roll, and yaw. Then, based on recorded data, students made inferences as to what could be causing their gliders to fly off-course, along with hypotheses about what modifications might remedy it.
Students altered the structural components of the airfoil, manipulated the weight distribution along the fuselage, and altered the configuration of the elevon and rudder flight controllers. The ultimate objective was straight, steady, sustained flight. But next week, students will need to use their data to modify their crafts on-the-spot to perform "trick" maneuvers and "land" with the closest proximity to a target. Today students entered the iterative design stage of their engineering projects. By conducting reiterative testing, making observations, analyzing data, and drawing conclusions, they were able to repeatedly return "back to the drawing board" and make modifications and improvements in effort to optimize their gliders for consistent, stable, level flight over a maximum distance.
This required some knowledge of flight dynamics, and so students reviewed the principle components of flight: thrust, drag, and lift, along with the principal axes of motion: pitch, roll, and yaw, completing a Data Table using their own crafts and with reference to this web simulation provided by the Academy of Model Aeronautics's Flight School. Today students were introduced to our first real engineering project of the year. In honor of the Flugtag event being held at the Louisville Waterfront this Saturday, students will be constructing their own single-wing, ultralight gliders based on the FPG-9 model developed by Jack Reynolds at the Academy of Model Aeronautics's National Model Aviation Museum (and then incorporated into the Aerolab modules developed by Alcoa). Today was dedicated first to reviewing the stages of the Engineering Design Process, and then to focusing on development of a prototype. Students carefully examined videos of the two top Flugtag record-holders to identify strategies and key structural components, and then discussed constraints and specifications of their crafts. Finally, they set to work building from an initial template, which will later be modified based on results from preliminary testing.
Today students examined their own data from their Metric Olympic event, along with classmates' data and other unrelated data sets to practice conducting data analysis.
Basic measures of central tendency (arithmetic mean, median, and mode) were reviewed, along with range and patterns of distribution (including normal, or "bell curve" distribution as compared to distributions that are more skewed, such as long-tail distributions). The concept of outliers, best value, uncertainty and margin of error were all discussed, along with the distinction between accuracy and precision. Upper-level students practiced calculating standard deviation and younger students began work on best values and uncertainty. (Note: You must be logged-in with a BCPS account to access.) Students were asked to use this tool hosted by the BBC which compiles data on over 10,500 Olympians in order to compare their own "biometrics" (age, weight, and height) to identify their Olympic athlete twin, and then complete this sheet examining the data. |
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January 2017
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