Rationale:
Do you know how birds and planes fly? If you do, can you explain it to a 10 year old? Mostly, only those with a background in engineering and physics clearly understand how things fly. Only a few of them can explain it in purely non-technical terms. Is Aerodynamics really that complex that you cannot teach it to a middle-school student? What if a person with a background in philosophy wants to learn how things fly? Are the resources available in the first page of Google good enough?
Introduction:
The idea is to turn information into experience so that learning becomes seamless and intuitive.
- All content is explained using 1000 of the most common words in English as far as possible.
- Workshops are designed on making, flying, and testing paper planes and other simple setups to make learning more interactive, intuitive, and fun.
- Some interactive web applications / games in the future that will give a feel about how variation of affecting parameters affects the flight
How do you know if a person understands the basics of aerodynamics?
Our guess is, if they can clearly answer following sets of questions, they have a general idea of how things fly.
- What are the forces that act on a flying object?
- Why are flying objects shaped the way they are? (streamlined)
- How do wings of an aeroplane help lift them?
- How does pressure difference help flight?
- How are jet engines different from, say, diesel engines?
Approach:
This is an open educational practice, which means that the content and other resources like methodology, working principle etc. are freely accessible, reusable, and redistributable for anyone with access to internet.
The idea is to try to create activities that helps answer each of the questions above.
How to Contribute: Contributing
Participation Guidelines: Mozilla Community Participation Guidelines
License: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0