Abstract:
Post-graduate education in aircraft design needs to prepare students for their
future roles as professional engineers in the aerospace industry. A key
requirement from industry is for students to learn how to deal with realistic
open ended design problems during their University education, and group design
projects have been shown to provide an excellent means to develop these skills.
Cranfield University has a long history of teaching aircraft design using group
design projects. This paper describes a recent initiative to extend the scope of
the group design projects at Cranfield to incorporate rapid prototyping
activities and give students hands-on experience of translating a digital design
into a physical prototype.
