These pages describe an educational activity which I have presented at several different schools and workshops. There are two main objectives to the activity; one is to expose the students to the operation of the aerospace industry, and the other is to put the student in a team environment to learn some things about how teams work. On the following pages I have some slides built into the html pages. If you click on the "Show Slide" button below each slide you can get your own copy in a large format by using the print command on your browser. Use what you like. The "Back" command of the browser will return you to the narrative.

The exercise usually begins with about a 5 minute overview of how aerospace works. You'll be surprised at how many students believe that the Air Force builds and flies the airplanes. The activity itself consists of building and flying a paper airplane. To make things interesting, we put the students into groups (companies) which must produce one airplane per group in a short time (usually about 15 minutes). The groups "fly-off" against each other in a competition to see who can keep their plane in the air the longest. The fly-off usually takes about 10 minutes as well. After the fly-off, the fun begins with a discussion with all the companies. This discussion is guided by you as the leader and runs for the duration of the exercise (20 minutes).

The emphasis of the activity is not on the aerodynamics of their gliders or who wins the contest, but on the process that produced the plane. There are several variations on the basic game which I have used to make things more interesting. If you have a large group, I make large companies (5 -10 students), give them enough resources that everybody can make their own plane, but ask for only one plane from each group. The discussion then becomes one of evaluating how they chose the one design and the team dynamics. To stir the pot a little more, I sometimes randomly appoint one person in each company to be the manager. This usually introduces a lot of management-worker (authority) problems, given the short time span to accomplish the task. The most interesting variation is to appoint manager, design team, manufacturer, and test (pilot) positions, to clearly define the roles of each, and to enforce boundaries (managers can't fold paper .. manufacturers can't fly). This emphasizes the problems of communications within a team.

In the discussions it is important to point out that the problems they encounter (time scheduling, bias, authority, communications, personalities .. etc) are all things that we face on the job every day. Solving these problems are every bit as important as solving differential equations, and the problem solving skills are learned in school, at home, and at their jobs. There's much more to aerospace than airplanes and rockets.

CLICK HERE to download your own power point presentation of this activity.