Re: Re: AMA indoor beginners class from Bill Gowen on 2006-06-12 ([Indoor

From: Bill Gowen <b.gowen_at_earthlink.net>
Date: Mon, 12 Jun 2006 14:08:02 -0400

John
I missed the earlier discussion but this sounds like a GREAT idea! Maybe NFFS could pick up on this. The awards would not have to be costly. In fact it might be nothing more than having your name put on a list. It would give new fliers something to work towards where they wouldn't have to beat the "experts". Also maybe there could be an achievement ladder for several different common events.

Jeff, your website would be a good place to keep this if no "official" group is interested.

What would it take to get this started? Any ideas from the membership? I might try to do something like this in my local club.
Bill Gowen
Decatur, GA USA

  ----- Original Message -----
  From: John Kagan
  To: Indoor_Construction_at_yahoogroups.com
  Sent: Monday, June 12, 2006 1:13 PM
  Subject: [Indoor_Construction] Re: AMA indoor beginners class

  --- 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.



[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
Received on Tue Jun 13 2006 - 00:50:27 CEST