Learning Design of Experiments with Paper Helicopters
Posted on October 11, 2009 Comments (3)
Photo showing the helicopter test track by BradDr. George E.P. Box wrote a great paper on Teaching Engineers Experimental Design With a Paper Helicopter that can be used to learn principles of experimental design, including – conditions for validity of experimentation, randomization, blocking, the use of factorial and fractional factorial designs and the management of experimentation.
I ran across an interesting blog post on a class learning these principles today – Brad’s Hella-Copter:
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We were to design a helicopter that would drop 3 stories down within the 2ft gap between flights of stairs.
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[design of experiments is] very powerful when you have lots of variables (ie. paper type, helicopter blade length, blade width, body height, body width, paperclip weights, etc) and not a lot of time to vary each one individually. If we were to individually change each variable one at a time, we would have made over 256 different helicopters. Instead we built 16, tested them, and got a feel for which variables were most important. We then focused on these important variables for design improvement through further testing and optimization.
Related: 101 Ways to Design an Experiment, or Some Ideas About Teaching Design of Experiments by William G. Hunter (my father) – posts on design of experiments – George Box on quality improvement – Designed Experiments – Autonomous Helicopters Teach Themselves to Fly – Statistics for Experimenters
Categories: Education, Engineering, K-12, Science, Students, Universities
Tags: data, Engineering, engineering education, experiment, learning, statistics, teachers
3 Responses to “Learning Design of Experiments with Paper Helicopters”
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March 23rd, 2011 @ 5:29 pm
“I hadn’t done any building like that. The whole day was fun. It was a very open learning environment. You were experimenting with things you had never done before. I would definitely do it again,” Sarah said. And she will – next year…
April 24th, 2011 @ 6:55 pm
The objective of the Do Science, Tanzania project is to share teaching strategies and equipment with science teachers and students in Moshi, Tanzania. The goal is to facilitate a more active science program and to inspire students to continue studying beyond the secondary level…
November 6th, 2014 @ 9:29 am
[…] it is about being curious about things – Box on Quality – Soren Bisgaard – Learning Design of Experiments with Paper Helicopters – Peter […]