Windsor High School students mimic airdrops in STEM competition

Drawing from his extensive paper airplane expertise, Joshua Alvarez led his five-person Windsor High School Team to greatness Tuesday during a glider competition held at the Sonoma Jet Center.

More than 200 teens competed in the event hosted by Windsor’s Axis STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) Academy, to create a glider that could safely deliver an egg as far as possible once released from a weather balloon 20 feet up. It was a new spin on the classic physics class egg drop that was dreamed up by Axis engineering teacher Sean Vezino.

His idea was modeled after humanitarian airdrops, with the teens charged with envisioning how to deliver their packages safely to a target destination.

The 9th- and 10th-grade students were divvied up arbitrarily into teams, while the juniors and seniors, who’ve already chosen their STEM majors, acted as coaches.

Teams had three hours to plan and assemble their gliders using materials provided in the brightly lit airplane hangar, which was filled with a cacophony of shouts and laughter as teams tried and failed and tried again to create gliders that could not only glide but deliver their fragile payloads.

Alvarez, a 9th-grader, took the lead on his team’s 3-foot-long glider. The fuselage was a ½-inch piece of thin wood with oversized wide cardboard wings, cardboard rudder and horizontal stabilizer. A raw egg was inside a water bottle nestled at the glider’s nose.

Teams attached their gliders to the weather balloon using a carabiner, clothespin and a long piece of string, which, when gently pulled, dropped gliders into what were, for most teams, violent death spins.

But the Alvarez team’s glider successfully sailed 37 feet and landed with the egg intact as the hangar erupted in cheers.

Alvarez laughed off his team’s success, chalking it up to “luck.”

“I knew we wanted a pretty big wingspan for it to go longer, and I don’t know, it’s, like, I get it,” he said. “I’ve made a bunch of paper airplanes.” After some thought he added, “It could’ve been better.”

“That’s what he thinks,” said 16-year-old junior Brandon Dawson, a self-proclaimed airplane enthusiast who acted as a coach for Alvarez’s team. “I don’t think he understands that he knows what he knows.”

Ondine Davis, 14, a member of the winning team, noted that the plane’s rudder was the same kind of stability steering mechanism as her dad’s kayak.

“It’s so funny that little things like that play into something like this, like little things that you wouldn’t think you’d need to know in the future,” she said.

After about 20 attempts, the second-place team glider had only flown ?12 feet.

“They’re doing miserable,” Vezino said, laughing. “And it’s what we expected them to do.”

The junior and senior coaches, decently versed in aeronautics, competed in a similar competition a couple of weeks ago, and that went almost equally as poorly as Tuesday’s.

The idea, Venzino said, is to try, test and fail; try, test and fail.

“That’s the only way you learn,” he said.

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