IDEA program students take flight with polyhedral kite design

IDEA—Innovation, Design, Engineering, Action—is a project-based elective at Woodstock Union that challenges students to learn by doing, tackling real design and engineering problems with their hands and their minds.

This semester, middle school IDEA students are putting that spirit to work in a big way: designing and building kites inspired by Alexander Graham Bell's famous Tetrahedral Kites from the early 1900s. To kick things off, students dove into polyhedral geometry—the study of three-dimensional solids made from polygons—and built their own small models from scratch. It was a lot of fun, and the kites are just getting started.