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Terratech airplane design project

Subject: The Design Process/ Iterative Design/ The Engineering Process 

Topic: Airplane Design 

Lesson Objectives: Given 4 work periods totaling 2 hours, students will use their understanding of the design process and flight to create and refine airplane that can fly in Terratech - a physics-based videogame. The emphasis will be on redesigning after failure. 

Summary of tasks: On the first day, students are introduced to the design process via a five-minute video, discussion, and a visual on our media center website. Students are then tasked with learning the basic controls of Terratech by playing the game's campaign mode. This features a nice-yet-incomplete tutorial of the mechanics, controls, and features of the game. One the second day, students receive their assignment - or rather their design problem. To emphasize and review the design process, the steps of the assignment are broken down as steps in the design process. A graphic of the forces of flight is also discussed. Before sending students to the computer lab, I model how to bring up the game, change the graphics settings, and begin designing a basic plane. I model my thinking in what my plane might need upon first failure. 

The third day of the project focuses on coming up with a new design problem once flight is attained. We discuss making planes faster, larger, and for specific purposes (military planes, celebrations, humor). Some pictures are shared of successes, and I once again model the design process, making my original plane faster and larger by degrees. 

One the final two days of the assignment, students turn in their assignments by uploading screenshots to a save file in the lab. This process is modeled and I uploaded a screencast of my exact, in-person demonstration for those who might want to slow the process down. Students who finished - and most students did - got to fly drones in media center while others finished. This was more joy and fun than edification. 

Materials: 

​1. The RLES Media Center Website:
Project Day #1
Project Day #2 through #4 
2. Computer Lab and 24 digital copies of Terratech. 
3. Mambo Drones and iPads 

​

Students at Work and play 

Student Airplane Designs 

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  • Assignments
    • Kindergarten
    • 1st Grade
    • 2nd Grade
    • 3rd Grade
    • 4th Grade
    • 5th Grade
  • Resources
    • Ebooks
    • Ojibwe Language
    • Keyboarding Games
    • Dictionary
    • 3D Printing
    • Canva
    • Research
    • Links
  • Student Work
    • TerraTech Airplanes
    • 3rd Grade Medieval Village!
    • Go Animate Videos
    • Coding & Robotics
    • 5th Grade Arcade
    • Bloxels Arcade!
    • CoSpaces Assignments
  • Book Search
  • Exploratory Class
    • 5th Exploratory
    • 4th Exploratory
    • 3rd Exploratory
    • Aviation Club!
  • Esports
    • Drone Racing League!
    • Gaming