We were prompted by a dandelion seed and a seed from the movie Avatar. After our brainstorm we had three strong ideas. Our ideas were matchbox rockets, a flying lantern, and a propellor.The next step was to prototype them. We thought of methods to produce lift. The first method we came up with was heat.

    Matchbox rockets were our first idea. We researched how to make them and gathered materials. We used matches, tin foil, and skewers. These flew well but went up and down very quickly. We tried to solve this problem by adding different parachutes, but these were too heavy and caused the rockets to never leave the ground. We decided to not include this in our final.

    The next idea we modeled was a miniature hot air balloon/floating lantern. After researching paper lanterns and hot air balloons it was time to model. We made many models using wax and rice paper, by hand and in Rhino. All of them either went down in flames or didn’t fly at all. After a few days of this idea we decided to try something else.

    Our final idea was propellers. We had one very powerful motor that we started with. After a tragic accident that resulted in injury and broken propellers we ditched the powerful motor. Instead we used four small motors taken from a quadcopter attached to a 3D printed frame. This model included fiber optic wires and LEDs. Although we ran into many problems such as too much weight, not enough LEDs, and issues printing, this ended up being our final.

    We then decided to add another component to our project. After experimenting with rice paper we decided to make a mobile with small rice paper models and LEDs. The idea was that these would be more closely related to our original idea and our flying model would fly through and around the mobile.

    After a lot of frustration, conflicting ideas, and compromise we are all happy with our final product.