End of First Year
We didn’t make nearly as much progress as I had expected. We have the rudder, anti-servo tabs and vertical stabilizer done, and are close to finishing the stabilator but have run out of time. Some of the wing parts are complete, too, like the main spars.
Here is what I think contributed to the low progress.
1. We have limited class hours, with six classes 55 minutes long and two 80 minute long ones per week, spread out over a morning and an afternoon class. Out of those we need to get the tools and parts out, set them up, and later put them back. We can’t leave things set up for the next work session.
2. Of those eight classes, only five have mentors available, and then only one mentor per class. We have mentors for two morning classes a week and three of the afternoon classes. Thanks, Ron and Norm! Early on, while the students were still building skills and learning how to build an airplane, we told the students that they can’t work on the plane without a mentor. They just weren’t ready yet. But more recently, with the second semester winding down, some of the teams are entirely capable of working autonomously, and this did help.
3. The workspace is marginal. We’re using a computer lab area. It has awkward spacing, poor lighting, and we’ve had a work table limitation from the very beginning. Parts and tool storage are not readily at hand. There is no apparent way to remove the fuselage from the workspace except for removing a window and using a crane or work lift to take it down from the second-story workspace. Hate to admit it, but this is the current plan.
4. The class competes with a robotics lab, which also is a hands-on class, but which offers design opportunity to their students. To some extent this draws interest away and limits the pool of students who may be interested. There is a certain amount of tool sharing between the classes, with the robotics students telling us that we have the best tools. But they have the general-purpose tools that we don’t. Sometimes tools get mislaid.
5. Surprisingly for me, many of the students in the airplane class needed very basic instruction. Things like which way to turn a screw or how to measure something were wholly new to them. Naturally, this tended to slow the initial effort of coming up to speed.
6. We had enough practice kits, thanks to Ernie, but not really enough mentors to teach them. This is the phase that really needs hands-on instruction and plenty of similar tools. Partly for this and partly because “about right” wasn’t good enough, a number of students dropped out of the game. They had an alternate path: electric drone model airplanes and flight simulators, all offering the immediate satisfaction that the actual airplane didn’t. Of course even us experienced builders sometimes need that sense of immediate results; I bake bread and cookies, for example, and I know others who do similar things. Can’t blame the teenage students, but maybe we could have taught them differently. The mentors generally had RV experience but not teaching experience.
7. The high school had somewhat minimal support, and the poor work bench issue is an example - we had to supply our own and did, thanks to Gregg. Worse, there are no pre-established curriculums; what we came up with were put together as we get started. I did try to provide a sense of how the work would flow, but it wasn’t a curriculum. I expect that some of the students joined the class with expectations which were considerably more ambitious than the actual project entails.
Still, after all that, we have three of the afternoon students that I’d trust to build an airplane by themselves now, and two of these became good team leaders. However, one of the initial team leaders never quite got the hang of leading and eventually became one of the part-timers. One of the better team leaders is a junior with another school year to go, that one will take on mentor responsibilities next year as well as being a team leader. Unfortunately for use, the other good one is graduating this month. Frankly, I hate to see him go. I never really got to know the other fourteen or so afternoon students nominally in the class that never contributed to the project.
Two of the better qualified students are taking the class next year too. One of them, a current team leader, will become a mentor. The others are graduating this month.
If any of you have recommendations, please let us know. Thanks!
Dave