Glider

• We needed to come up with the ideal glider: stays up in the air a long time and travels a long distance.

• Brainstorming rules:

1. Throw out random ideas to team members
2. Have every member contribute ideas and listen to them even if they seem whack
3. Jot down as my ideas as possible
4. Build on ideas and begin to organize them into actual processes
5. There are no rules as to what is a good or bad idea!

• Criteria: coming up with the best solution for a glider that has a long duration in the air, is fast, and can travel far
• Constraints: limited materials (tissue paper, regular paper, thin sticks, tape, glue), wind, can't be too small

• Using the CAD software (these are the four main pieces of the glider):

• Some of our ideas:

There wasn't really one idea thought up of first, but we decided to try imitating Da Vinci's helicopter design before anything else.

It seemed like a great idea at first, BUT! we didn't really have the materials to pull it off right. It wasn't going to be strong enough with the thin sticks we were supplied with.

We then thought we might try making more of an actual glider (like most others).

We gave it a tail and what we thought were wide enough wings.

This is what it looked like at first:

Once we tested it out, we saw that it kept flipping and didn't really go far so we tweaked things and changed certain parts of it, like the shape and length of the wings. We also moved the tail we had made to the top to see if it would help:

We tried making sure there was enough weight on the front of the glider as well and that the sticks were being used effectively, not just sitting there useless.

This was our ending result:

(just pretend I'm not in it)

• The day of the Challenge:

- Our glider didn't do so bad. It did stay in the air a while, but it still did its flip that we tried to avoid.

- If it were less windy, I think our glider would have done a lot better, but even so it at least gained some height before going to the ground.

- I think that to change it, I would try finding a way to keep it on a straight path. For our glider, our best chance at winning in the competition would be to aim for getting it to stay in the air long, which we did the first time we threw it and not so much the second time.

- Mostly, my group had a great time coming up with random ideas and putting things together.

It was a great project!