Reflection on glider’s design competition on 26 July 2011

Today is the glider’s design competition day. All the groups brought their final design to the class.

And all the gliders have to go through two parts of competition, one is to fly the gliders within a specific distance and the other is to fly the gliders as far as possible.

Each of the group needs to appoint a designated member to launch the glider. However, we encounter a little problem here as our designated member was sick on that day, thus we have to appoint another member to replace her. Still, in the end we manage to solve the problem as each of the group members did practice a lot on how to fly the glider before the competition.

This is the picture of all groups' planes. As you can see, each of them has their own shape, colour and design.

During the competition, each of the group got a chance to look at other group’s glider’s design and its performance. We appreciated for this chance to learn from others. For example, one of the group uses recycle material plastic foam pallet to make their glider, we think that their idea is very innovative.

Overall, our group’s glider performs quite well. Especially in the second part of the competition, our plane was able to fly quite straightly, steady and far, and the average distance travelled by our glider is 880cm which is the second best result in the class. And we really admired the first one’s performance whose average distance is about 2300m. It is made of paper and rubber band. The pilot drew back the rubber band, when he released it the airplane could far very far with the aid of the power of rubber band. It was a quite clever idea.

There was still room for us to improve and we could perform better in the competition. For instance the first competition, our airplane flied a bit far from the prescribed line. It was because we launched the plane a bit harder than required. Thus we lacked enough practice to fly with appropriate strength before the competition.

This video was taken during our second competition. And you can see how our group's plane flied from it.

After doing this project, we are already able to recognize many key features in airplanes that cause them to have optimal balance, low drag and high lift.

Through doing this project, it gives us a better insight into the complexity of designing a new aircraft’s configuration.

GLIDER’S DESIGN PROJECT REFLECTION ——PART3

In order to find out a best design, we tried to fold lots and lots of different type of paper plane.

It was not an easy job at all. Since none of our group member has the experience of folding paper plane or making plane model, we have to spent time to find resources from book and the internet which teach us how to fold paper plane. However, we can’t just simply follow the steps and instruction. We have to recall all the key features which can make an airplane fly stable and far such as increasing lift or reduce drag. And with all these knowledge, we then make changes to improve on the original design.

Finally, we made out our paper plane, which is called The Avenger Flyer!

For our design, we have certain features to highlight. 

Firstly, the nose of the paper plane is heavy to ensure stable fight, and we put on a paper clip on the nose to allow the paper plane to fly further. In addition, the heavy nose will also keep the centre of gravity towards the front to prevent the plane from stalling.  

Secondly, the wings are angled upwards and winglets are added to the edge of the wings which are good features to reduce drag.

Lastly, to make sure the paper plane is entirely symmetrical and this can be check by looking down the nose of the plane. Thus, the air plane will fly smoothly and maintain optimal balance.

We incorporate all these features into our design and it works well, thus we choose this as our final design.

This picture is the source of our plane where our idea came from.

And the videos below shows the process of us doing our paper plane.