Iterative Learning Though Experience

When children do GCSE D&T they usually make an artefact and the trick is to get them to produce paperwork that backs their design up. What anybody outside education might not know is the pressure on teachers to get 120 children to design and make a product to order. The pressure to 'teach to the test', 'scaffold' and produce crib sheets results in less and less authentic learning, even if the grades are good. And the product that a pupil makes is barely a prototype in reality - rarely functioning or tested in the field and almost certainly never re engineered better and better as products are in the real world.

In Aeroschool 2016 as in the image to the right we made multiples of our plane test structures, test foam filling, we crashed prototypes and repaired them again and again. And surprisingly students don't seem to mind! They take failure very much as part of learning. This must be unique to aeromodelling because gravity is absolutely unforgiving.

A competition judge came to me during the event and reported that the judges had spoken to our team in my absence and they were impressed that my students knew everything about their aircraft. Go me! Hardly surprising as they'd built many of them!​