May Aviation and Aeronautical Engineering 2026

Week 30: Aeronautical Engineering & Aircraft Design

If you are curious how airplanes fly without flapping like a bird, how to read aircraft instruments and tell which runway to land on, what it’s like inside a real cockpit on a 747, and how hypersonic aircraft can go so fast without melting the wings off, then this is the class for you! You’ll learn the major components of aircraft, how to control aircraft in flight, what kinds of weather you can and can’t fly through, how engineers design new aircraft engines, and so much more. Did you know there’s a pilot shortage? A LOT of pilots are nearing retirement age, and it has a lot of folks concerned that we won’t have enough pilots in the future to take people and packages where they need to go!

• Week 30 Aeronautical Engineering: Aircraft Design (Worksheet #30)

Pilot Interviews & Flights with a CFI!

Join us in asking pilots questions and learning what it takes to become a real pilot, what types of jobs are available today, and how much fun it is to be a pilot for over 3 decades! You'll also get to jump onboard for an introductory flight with a certified flight instructor! This was streamed live, so enjoy the live element, including the camera bumps, technical glitches, and student questions.

Week 31: Aviation: Navigation, Instruments, Avionics

We'll take you from zero to soaring through the clouds with a certified flight instructor. Discover the different flight instruments that pilots use to fly the airplane and make sure they reach their destination. You'll also get to meet airline captains, military pilots, and more with this hands-on set of flying sessions designed to get you inspired to take flight!

• Week 31 Avionics & Instruments (Worksheet #31)

Week 32: Rocketry & Spaceflight

Soar, zoom, fly, twirl, and gyrate while you learn what it takes to move through the vacuum of space! Learn about different propulsion drive systems and how rockets accelerate to escape the gravitational pull.

• Week 32 Rocketry, Spacecraft Propulsion & Design (Worksheet #32)

Making Your Own Science Lab Worksheet

How do you create a science lesson worksheet that really captures what you're trying to do with your lessons? When I taught mechanical engineering at Cal Poly state university, one of the big things that students struggled with was creating their own data tables, because they had relied on other people / textbooks / teachers to always provide them with a "worksheet" to go with their "lab".

This means that they never developed the ability to generate their own work. What's worse, they didn't really understand how to think like a scientist. And that's something you can start doing now, no matter how old/young your kids are!

There's really nothing magical about a science worksheet or data tables. You don't need a "printable" or anything fancy. These data tables and worksheets are actually just an expression of what naturally comes out of your science experiment. And the whole point to doing an experiment is to answer a question.

So we start with a question, and we make sure it's something we can design an experiment around it, so it has to be answerable with something that is measurable. The rest is really very easy!

The ideas in the video here are taken from my college-level lab reports that we had students turn in at the end of a standard three-hour experiment. This format has been adjusted to hone in on the essential things you must have to make it a real science lab data sheet.