At AEROFAIR 2015, we want to promote the establishment of Aerospace Clubs (or Aerospace Divisions in Science Clubs) at secondary schools. If we have a good number of schools having Aerospace Clubs in the Pulau Pinang region, we can start building a network of Aerospace Clubs, where the School of Aerospace Engineering USM can serve as an adviser to these clubs, and the Flyoutreach website can serve as a “networking hub” for these clubs.
The Indoor Flight program can serve as a good platform to create initial activities to start-up these Aerospace Clubs. One activity to start with is to keep making better indoor plane models with longer flight times than the record time we have at AEROFAIR 2015. These flights can be recorded in videos and uploaded into YouTube to be shared through our Flyoutreach website with the Aerospace Clubs from other schools.
There is a lot of room for improvement and learning when it comes to making indoor planes. A beginner’s design can fly between 1 to at most 3 minutes only. An slightly better beginner’ design can fly around 5 minutes or more. Advanced designs commonly seen in competitions at the international levels can fly more than 30 minutes. World record stands at more than 1 hour. So, between a design that flies for 1 minute and a design that flies for 1 hour, there’s a lot of science to be learned and techniques to be improved. In short, there is plenty of opportunity here for learning through applications of theory, and through fun activities of course.
In the long run, Indoor Flight is just one of the many interesting activities that Aerospace Engineering can offer. There are definitely other activities such as Water Rockets, Solid-Fuel Rockets, Remote-Control Planes, Hot Air Balloons, and many more. With these myriads of activities, we foresee that Aerospace Clubs at secondary schools are good co-curricular platforms to easily motivate and sustain students’ interests into science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) subjects.
If your secondary school would like to start an Aerospace Club, or a Science Club with aerospace activities in it, come and join us at the AEROFAIR 2015 program. We can have more discussions about setting up this network of Aerospace Clubs at AEROFAIR 2015 on April 25th.
For the time being, we encourage schools who are interested in establishing an Aerospace Club/Division to start thinking about this possibility, its benefits to students, and how it fits into the new Malaysian educational approach to enhance Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS).