Teamwork in Aerospace Variation

Glenn Research Center

These pages describe an educational activity which I have presented at several different schools and workshops. There are two main objectives to the activity; one is to expose the students to the operation of the aerospace industry, and the other is a team dynamics exercise. After you've completed the background information, you are ready to get into the activity. On this page I have put some special slides for a more difficult version of the game. In this variation, you subdivide the companies into their respective work units; management, design, manufacturing, and testing. This now becomes an exercise in communications skills because you define very clear lines of responsibility. One group must explain to the next group what is to be done, but they can't do it themselves. So the designer must tell the manufacturer how to fold a paper airplane, but the designer can't do any folding. This is really difficult!

Here are the slides for the various work units:

These are the manager's tasks. To put even more pressure on the manager (since they make the big bucks!) I tell the managers that if anyone on their team cheats (pilot folding an airplane) that the team is disqualified and the manager is responsible.

The discussion of this version is slightly different than the normal game because of all of the difficult elements of communication.