Building Tetrahedral Kites

Industrial engineers work to find out ways to make our experiences better. They engineer processes and systems that improve quality and productivity and work to eliminate wasting time, money, materials, energy and other commodities. This month's activities will highlight making a specific product and evaluating how to produce it more efficiently.

Building Tetrahedral Kites, asks students to design the process for building kites. Working in teams of four, each team builds a tetrahedral kite following a specific set of directions and using specific provided materials. Each team uses basic processes of manufacturing systems - cutting, shaping, forming, conditioning, assembling, joining, finishing, and quality control — to manufacture a complete tetrahedral kite within a given time frame. Evaluation of the projects should involve the efficiency of the teams as well as their finished products.

From kite racing to hang-gliders, kites have come a long way in the last 2000 years. Then again, even with the information available to us today, kite design is a challenge due to the number of variables associated with it. To increase the focus of the activity on industrial design, it's important to ask the students at the end to consider how a team of students can most efficiently produce a finished product — the tetrahedral kite — using manufacturing processes.

Each month, the Engineering Pathway portal to the National Science Digital Library (NSDL) provides an activity related to the JETS' Pre-Engineering Times monthly theme. This month's activities are from the TeachEngineering Digital Library section of the Engineering Pathway portal.