Our long term goal is to promote indoor flight to secondary school students so that it can become one of the common co-curricular activities at schools. We believe indoor flight activities can offer many benefits towards promoting science at secondary schools:
- Motivate self-learning: The process of designing and building indoor planes are relatively easy with the help of many ready-made designs available on the internet, but the process of perfecting the planes to make them flyable is quite challenging because it requires some understanding on aerodynamics and stability. These needs will motivate students to self-learn through resources available on the web.
- Application of theory: Theory is best learned when it is practiced. Secondary school syllabus does include learning the aerodynamics but without any real and immediate applications. Designing and building indoor planes offer the opportunity to students to experience the working of aerodynamic principles in real life.
- Cheap materials: Currently, one of the most famous science activities and competitions at the secondary school level is the Lego Robotic Competitions. However, the biggest challenge to scale up these activities to a large number of schools is the expensive price of the Lego kits, which can go up to thousands of Ringgits. On the other hand, from our rough estimates, a single indoor plane can be built with raw materials for less than RM20. This is an exciting prospect to promote and scale up indoor flight activities to school students.
- Exciting competitions: Indoor flight activities are quite common in many countries with various competitions held at the national levels as well as the international levels. The prospect that students who participate in these activities can compete at the international levels can be very exciting and motivating. We also plan to hold many indoor flight competitions in the future to promote the indoor flight activities.
- Promoting English: The Indoor Flight activities will also promote the use of using English to learn science. Students will need to use many resources on the internet to learn about the design and building of indoor planes. Most of these resources are written in English.
- Networking opportunity: One scenario that can increase students’ interest in any type of activity is when they get a chance to get together and meet other students with similar interests from other schools, keeping updates on each other’s progress. In this program, we want to promote the establishment of a network of Aerospace Clubs in secondary schools, initiated with a focus on the indoor flight activities. USM School of Aerospace Engineering and our dedicated website can act as a “networking hub” for these Aerospace Clubs. You can read more about this effort here.