Glider Challenge

1. Final Design





2. Design Phase


1) The challenge is to create a glider using balsa wood and tissue paper. We have to make a glider that will hopefully glide the longest for the greatest amount of distance and most hangtime, if not both then it should do one of those things.

2) There are no rules to brainstorming. We went through all possible ideas and considered what would be the best approach to create the best design. We took ideas from the gliders around the class and we went online to look up ways in which the most efficient gliders are built, we then took these ideas to help create our own. Our idea was to create a glider with a short glider with long wings, angled up at 15 degrees and curved at the tips to reduce turbulance, then put two horizontal fins as well as one vertical fin. We ended not being able to to curve the wings because the wood would bend enough, also we ended up not being able to angle thie wings also, so we had to just put them flat, and we couldn't put a vertical wing because of lack of material.

3) Criteria: We had to use the material, the blasa wood and tissue paper, nothing else, and had to use glue and tape to stick things together, nothing else.

Constraints: The criteria really limited our creativity because we couldn't just use any material we wanted which limited what we could do.

4)

5)

3. Test Phase

4. Performance/ Improvements

Our glider did not perform very well at all, it dropped immediately and went backwards. I i think a lot of it had to do with the wings, the wings needed to be much shorter because they were to heavy and caught too much wind, the shape of the wings need to be changed because they weren't efficient, and lastly the wings were not supported right they were to flmsy. Also we needed to put on a vertical fin, that would have helped a lot.