Re: AMA indoor beginners class

From: John Kagan <john_kagan_at_hotmail.com>
Date: Mon, 12 Jun 2006 17:13:32 -0000

--- In Indoor_Construction_at_yahoogroups.com, "izgo" <izgo@...> wrote:
>
> If you start driving a Formula 1 car you will crash, be sure :)

Fortunately you won't end up in the hospital if you crash and burn on
your first "high end" model (although your ego may take a hit).

As I'm fond of pointing out (mostly 'cause I like ribbing them), many
of our top youngsters build first F1D's that were, to put is as
nicely as I can, pieces of cr*p. But their second ones sure
weren't. And before long these guys were at the top of the heap.

Doesn't mean we don't need beginner events though. We had a sidebar
discussion on this a couple of months ago that evolved my opinion.
Now I think a good beginner event is defined by:

- Elimination of some complexities (at the expense of extra rules).
Make it a little easier to build decent model. Note that I didn't
say "easiest", since that is largely up for debate. Some people
thing film covering is easy, others think tissue is easy, and a more
than a few think microfilm is easy.

- Accessibility. Contrary to some opinion, I think challenges are
good and motivating for beginners. But accessible challenges. It's
not too much fun to start with a design that calls for all kinds of
hard to obtain materials (at least for a beginner).

- An achievement goal that has nothing to do with the other people
(aka experts) who might fly the event. This was my biggest
revelation from that other discussion. My favorite proposal is
modeled after R/C Soaring's League of Silent Flight program
(www.silentflight.org). In that, you fulfill a defined set of tasks
to work your way from LSF Level I to Level IV (Level I is pretty
easy – a relatively short slope / thermal flight and 3 spot landings -
 but still a good beginner goal). In our case we might want to
define something like a 5 minute LPP flight. Give out an achievement
patch or stickers. The target stays the same regardless of "expert"
involvement, and the beginner has something rewarding to shoot for.
Received on Mon Jun 12 2006 - 10:14:26 CEST