Glider Design Photo Gallery The glider competition at Franklin. next photo Glider Design Video Clip See a glider in flight! (1MB Quick Time video. Free QuickTime 6 player required.)

This year, students from Mr. Ethan Medley's class at Franklin High School in Portland joined with OMSI and marked Public Science Day with a glider design competition! The glider design process began in the classroom, where the students used a special computer aided design program called Glider Design. The Glider Design program allowed the students to adjust wing length, angle, nose weight, and a variety of other factors on a "virtual glider", to see which designs would fly. After deciding on a design, the students printed out their blueprints from the software, and then built the actual gliders from balsa wood based on these plans.

The students flew their gliders at Franklin, and also brought the gliders with them to OMSI to fly as part of our Public Science Day festivities.

You can bring a glider design competition to your classroom! Just click on the link below to download the Glider Design program and instructions, as well as additional curriculum materials developed by Dr. David Hamilton of Franklin High School in Portland.

Download the Glider Design program and supporting materials for Junior and Senior high school classrooms. (Macintosh only)

Notes:

• Please note that the Glider Design software program is only available for Macintosh computers.
• The file above is a Macintosh .sit file, which will require a version of Aladdin Systems Stuffit or free Stuffit Expander software to decompress. When decompressed, this file will include the Macintosh-only Glider Design program, created by Michael Kamprath, ((c)1993 by NASA Space Grant). It also includes supporting files and documentation on the use of Glider Design and the aerodynamic model behind the software. Finally, this package also includes Dr. Hamilton's curriculum materials for bringing Glider Design to the classroom. (Note: The documents in this file are in Microsoft Word format.)
• If you do not have access to a Macintosh, but are interested in learning more about the aerodynamics of Gliders, you can also download this compressed .zip file containing only the supporting files and documentation, without the Mac-only software program. Note: To extract the documents from this archive file, please use WinZip, or a similar Windows utility such as the freeware program JustZIPit. Once extracted, the individual documents will be in MS Word format.

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