The Wright Stuff

Image credit: Jm@n Google 3-D warehouse 2011

What can you do with 200 square feet of corrugated cardboard, 100 feet of cardboard rollers, yards of yarn and Makedo connectors? If you add in over 20 students and 5 hours in the hot sun, you get a half-scale model of the Wright Flyer.


Why? Why would we do such a thing? I'm slightly crazy and the awesome students were actually really happy to do it. We finished up our Intro to Engineering course for the year with a four-week unit on the STEM concepts of recycling - where do plastic bottles, diapers, cardboard and glass come from, and where do they go when we throw them away. To "tangify" the lessons (I'm totally coining that word, meaning to make tangible) we did mini-challenges with Makedo and then brainstormed a LARGE group build using only recyclable materials.

In order to practice the design cycle, smaller student teams imagined projects and pitched them to everyone. Students voted and the winning project was to model the Wright Brothers' first flying machine, the 1903 Wright Flyer.
Working off of a Google SketchUp model of the Flyer (credit: J-m@n) from the 3-D warehouse, we shrunk it to half size and printed multiple views with dimensions. Students brought boxes, tubes, plastic bags and old yard, lots of it.


Although our ultimate goal of constructing such a solid Flyer that we could actually launch it failed, we did manage to put together over 75% of the very complicated airplane. I think each of us knows a ton more about Orville and Wilbur's ingenious design and how to work together on a project. We ran into the same issues that every project has: time overruns, material shortages, weather factors - but there's nothing better than practice to learn how to deal with these in a productive manner and keep progressing to a goal. Excellent work, students - you really did something special.

On Failure

I had someone this week ask me what to do if his or her engineering project "failed". Would he or she still have to present to the class?

I've never been good with failure. Something about coming from a driven family, my mother being a second generation immigrant and my father being the youngest of five where his dad was a longshoreman. We scrapped and scraped in many ways because we had to.

I even remember a time in my life when it felt like failure was an impossibility, when everything I did seemed to turn to gold. Why think about failing when it was not a reality?


The truth of it is, during that golden period I was the most despondent I've ever been. Accomplishment, academic and athletic success, and I was still hunted inside. I remember feeling embittered that honors could not make me happy inside or bring together my broken family.

Now, married thirteen years with four kids, I've had plenty of opportunities to fail. Plan a notable family activity, surely one for the scrapbooks, and end up mad with frustration instead. Promise myself I won't say that extra mean thing on the tip of my tongue. Too late. Love someone so hard that they'll stay on the straight and narrow. Nope.

It all extends to this class in a way. I feel like my growth as a person shows up in what I say and affects my students. I've had a lot of lumps and honestly get uncommonly excited about failure. It's that failure is instructive and presses the experience deep into our minds. My acceptance of "messing up" allows me more grace with others.

Failure or not, everyone will present. It's better that way, more honest and revealing, and those who have their project go awry will probably getting something juicier from the experience than those who got it on the first try.