Monday, April 11, 2011

Glider Challenge: Design Phase


1. Our final design is the white and blue hanglider second from the far left.
2. 1) What's the challenge? The challenge is to build an efficient glider given the materials of some balsa wood, glue, and tissue paper.

2) Brainstorm solutions:
-What are the rules of brainstorming? (oxymoron) I'd say there are no rules to brainstorming; the only thing that would even come close to being a rule would be "nothing rediculous", but that would defeat the purpose of brainstorming, as brainstorming is listing anything and everything that comes to mind when confronting a problem.
-List your ideas Hanglider, stealth bomber design, airplane design
-Sketch at least two of them

3) Specify:
-Criteria Has to be able to fly, has to have wings, should be designed to achieve the most hangtime and distance, should be somewhat accurate
-Constraints (be specific about materials available) Only given a few materials, I don't know the exact amount of materials, but I could guess that we got about 3-4 square feet of tissue paper, and maybe a total of 1.5 meters of balsa wood, weight, must be hand thrown

4) Develop Solutions:
-Sketch (with labels)

Bonus) Prototype with Paper
We made a prototype with the yellow plastic arms from the robo kits (picture of the prototype is included in my previous glider blog post).


3. As far as results go, our glider did pretty well despite our terrible and fatal test runs. We finished 3rd in distance and 1st in hangtime. If we did this again, I think we would defnitely change the wing size, as the stregnth of the balsa wood was not enough to support the massive wing size, and other groups with more of an airplane approach with smaller, more rigid wings seemed to work better than ours.
Worked with Ryan.

1 comment:

  1. Hi Andoni,

    Good to see what you and your team experienced with this project.

    You have some good insight on how you would change your design if you did this again.

    Try using the 4 quadrant technique we discussed in class for capturing feedback. You'll find this will really help you in proposing specific ways to redesign your effort.

    You mention the challenge early on. This is a great way to set up the "story" of your experience. How does this challenge relate to the criteria you mention?

    You're right, there are no "rules" to brainstorming! So please do come up with things as far out as you can. The one consideration to keep in mind would be to not pass judgement. The idea is to facilitate the flow of ideas and judgement can make people self concious or risk averse.


    And please turn off word verification on your comments!

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