Dave,
This post gets my vote for the best post of the year so far, and will be a very hard one to beat the rest of the year if you ask me. Awesome job by all three kids if you ask me. I think you know which one is the third one I am referring to. :o)
See Ya,
Pat
----- Original Message ----- From: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <Soaring@airage.com>
Sent: Sunday, March 06, 2005 5:06 PM
Subject: [RCSE] Science Fair Story
Just got off the phone with a couple of young folks and if I donât share this my face may break from grinning too much.
For the past three months a couple of high school students in our area have been working with me on a project to measure in-flight sailplane performance. They started by cutting some cores and bagging the wing (thanks, Phil for the videos). They calibrated the data recorder for altitude and airspeed (thanks Bill Parry and the folks at EagleTree Systems).
We salvaged enough pieces to put a 2M ship together and, when all was assembled, had about 5 sessions at the field to record data. Since itâs winter (still) in Oklahoma, most outings had 34 degree weather and overcast - sometimes with snow and ice (thanks Bob Peck for the website that let us watch for wind conditions to choose the flying sessions). But they were troopers and got through it all (donuts and coffee afterwards to review what we did - and warm up!).
They slugged through quite a bunch of data analysis to pick out air speed, altitude, sink rate, etc. Most flight sessions covered a range of trim settings to try and get good speed coverage. After pulling it all together, they ran my performance program and compared the trends between their data and the simulation (rather good, actually).
Off they went to district yesterday with their data, graphs, Martin Simonâs book (thanks Martin), pieces of the wing and the data recorder. They came back with:
- good discussions with many judges,
- special awards from the Navy,
- special awards from the Air Force,
- 1st place in their category,
- a trip to the next level (state competition) with their teacher,
- an awareness that science can be fun!
So if youâre ever in need of a science fair idea for your kids â or are mentoring someone elseâs â you need look no further than our hobby. There are still a lot of things to do that can fascinate our young people while also encouraging an old one.
Cody and Meganâs story is pretty neat and has a happy ending for them. They worked hard and earned it. Hope the other projects that have shown up on this forum have a good outcome as well.
- Dave R
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