Flying Into the First Week!

At Short Hills, everybody was excited to be back at International Ivy! On Wednesday, the students in Electrical Engineering with Arduino started to decide on a project to show what they had learned. Over break, they discussed their ideas with the teacher, and the class opted to build a plane that could propel itself with motors. Everyone quickly got to work on designing the frame and building a prototype.

Once they finished constructing their frame, campers went into the common area to test out their plane, but things didn’t go as planned. It seemed like the plane would do anything but fly straight! It looked like the plane had a mind of its own as it flipped over, dived to the floor, and veered from side to side! However, the class wouldn’t let this stop them. To troubleshoot, they kept trying to throw the plane at different angles and different amounts of power, and counted how many times the plane flipped and how many times it nosedived.

For their second model, the campers looked at what went wrong in the first design, and they made adjustments to their model so it would fly smoothly. The class started building, and this time, they decided to install the Arduino board onto the plane to make their tests more similar to what they originally wanted to do. After testing again, they worked on adding the motors, and they also added LED lights!

While the class has not finished yet, it seems like they are on track to achieve liftoff! Working together, everyone was able to contribute and have fun at the same time!