Teachers, are you a team builder?
- Doug Adomatis
- 2 days ago
- 4 min read
Take the challenge, build your team, and compete in the Aircraft Design Challenge sponsored by the General Aviation Manufacturers Association (GAMA).
Here’s why: Competition drives learning. Team competition requires collaboration. By taking the GAMA challenge, you will give your students the opportunity to use their unique skill sets for success to achieve a common goal. And with success, they are more likely to believe in themselves as contributing members of society. This achievement, through interpersonal collaboration, is uniquely human and not something that artificial intelligence can do.
As a high school classroom teacher, I have tremendous respect for athletic coaches, band instructors, and any educator who can organize a group of teenagers to complete a project, host an event, or lead a team through a season. Coordinating so many personalities, schedules, and skills requires dedication, patience, and a remarkable ability to inspire young people to work together. The result gives meaning to Aristotle’s phrase, “The whole is greater than the sum of the parts.” I want my students to have “the whole” experience. So, this year I took a shot at building a team for GAMA. Here is how it played out.
Our Winged Warriors were a rag-tag bunch of sim pilots, wannabe engineers, and computer hackers. Given the project of designing and flying a virtual aircraft in a virtual world, my students divided themselves into three groups:
Aerospace Designers: It is no surprise that designers are desirable talent in the GAMA Aircraft Design Challenge. This year’s dream team included twin brothers pursuing a career in mechanical engineering. They love using math to solve problems. They had experience with PlaneMaker (the aircraft design tool native to the X-Plane flight simulator). And they had the grit and determination to keep iterating their design right up to the competition deadline.
Test Pilots: If your school has flight simulators, there is no shortage of pilots. Our team included an international exchange student from Germany, who was familiar with the location of the scenario in the French Alps. When the challenge was revealed, his excitement was the initial spark that fueled our motivation. Also on our team was a senior student who had already earned his Private Pilot certificate. As a role model, his interest in the challenge gave others reason to take it seriously. All the pilots were eager to fly new aircraft designs, find the best route, and provide feedback to the designers on operational performance.
Project Managers: One of our team members brought her experience from First Robotics. She kept an engineering journal of our activities, which served as a resource for the documentation we had to submit. Another student was a whiz with technology and eager to configure the simulator settings, network computers, and keep the work flowing smoothly.
At first, everyone was doing their own thing. The pilots were happy to handle the initial task of route-finding. The designers tinkered among themselves. And the project managers got busy with documents, spreadsheets, and calendars. What pulled them together was the point system.
GAMA provided a plug-in for X-Plane that recorded and analyzed the data from every test flight. Points were awarded based on time, distance, payload, and fuel burned. Students soon learned that carrying heavy payloads over mountainous terrain is challenging. No amount of good piloting would make up for an aircraft that didn’t have enough lift. The team had to work together.
Often in a competition, there is a change in momentum when the team that is behind makes a breakthrough, which propels them towards the win. I remember that day well. It was mid-April. We are about two weeks in, with about two weeks to go. It was the day when the pilots and the designers met informally and talked candidly about the challenge. At the heart of the discussion was the tradeoff between going faster and carrying more payload. Ultimately, they all agreed that points were all that mattered, and the payload was worth the most points. The pilots agreed to the designers’ plan: maximize payload-carrying capability by increasing wing loading and minimizing engine weight.
With the final design, it took over 60 attempts to make it over the mountains and stick the landing with a score of over 12,000 points. Satisfied with the score and with the other requirements completed, we submitted our portfolio two hours before the midnight deadline. The portfolio included a one-page narrative of our design efforts, a pilot’s checklist used during the flight, and a 2-minute video in which the students reflected on what they had learned.
Three weeks later, the competition results were announced. We placed 3rd - not bad for our first attempt to compete on a national level. After the congratulatory text messages were exchanged (insert trophy emoji, smoking hot fire emoji, and celebration emoji), the first thing the team asked was, “Did they give any feedback?” and “How did we compare to other teams on the individual portfolio elements?” Wow. I interpret that as a great example of a team with a collaborative growth mindset.
In a world where AI is doing more academic instruction, it is tremendously satisfying to experience struggle and accomplishment through interpersonal collaboration. It makes education feel less like a machine and more like a human endeavor.
Find out more about the GAMA Aviation Design Challenge here:https://gama.aero/opportunities-in-ga/aviation-challenge/