Airplanes are an important vehicle for transporting people and goods across the globe. Despite their usefulness, airplanes exhibit behaviors that engineers still don’t understand and are expensive to build. For example, the airplanes you fly in to visit your family for the holidays may have cost over $100 million. Instead, scientists can build remote control planes, or RC planes, to study the behavior of full-scale planes. Not only can RC planes teach engineers about full-scale planes, they can also be used for drone delivery of goods, to monitor people’s farms, or for photographing wildfires.
The student handout will be given to all students working on the design challenge. It gives a brief recap of the story, it helps the students identify what they are attempting to achieve, and it recaps the design process.
This Instructor’s Guide provides the instructor additional information on how to run the design challenge with alternatives for materials and test setups as well as information to help make the design challenge a good educational experience.
The Telling the Story Video conveys the societal impact of the student’s research that is the basis for the design challenge and will set the problem-solving context for students.
The Design Challenge Video leads students through the design process. It indicates materials available, states what the criteria are for success and any constraints. It also gives a second ‘level’ of the design challenge that allows ‘early completers’ to move on to a slightly more difficult challenge.