Youth Aviation

leiafee · Post by **leiafee** » Sat Mar 08, 2008 9:47 pm

If you'll excuse the blatant plug, and cross-posting for a moment I'd like to let people know about http://youthaviation.pbwiki.com

This work-in-progress, throwing-ideas-about site, came about as a result of discussion during the Education Mini-Conference at Brooklands on 1st March. The original plan was to get like minded people together and share resources, ideas and see what others in a similar line were doing, with the aim of getting young people more involved in the world of aviation.

The general upshot was all very positive and there were some wonderful ideas about. A lot of people also mentioned the trouble with "re-inventing the wheel" so a central location to share ideas and resources without being tied to any one organisation seemed a good idea.

To that end I've stuck up a little 'wiki' (if you've no idea what I'm on about, that's a website which can be edited by lots of different people without the need for any software -- it's all online, they're big with schools now.

These things work better the more people are involved so if anyone wants the invite key to the wiki so they can add to it, just drop me an email. ([email protected])

Or if anyone has stuff they want to add but doesn't feel too confident "messing with computers" then pass it along and I can do it.

Peter Anthony · Post by **Peter Anthony** » Sun Mar 09, 2008 7:47 pm

Hello Leia,
Are you going to post the spiffy new Young Aviators certificate printing programme there.

P. S. I'm glad you explained what a Wiki is, I thought it was a Polynesian Totem pole!

leiafee · Post by **leiafee** » Sun Mar 09, 2008 7:54 pm

Once I get my head back in coding mode... Are the new certificates with the new logo and everything laid out the same as the old ones?

Peter Anthony · Post by **Peter Anthony** » Sun Mar 09, 2008 8:02 pm

As far as I know, I've seen a draft copy, but wasn't able to compare it with the old ones. Your best bet is to drop a line to Penny in the office and get a few for trial purposes.

Dave Hall · Post by **Dave Hall** » Mon Mar 10, 2008 12:32 am

The new design for YA Certificate is a full-bleed dark-blue like the headed paper and web-pages so I believe the intention is for them to be printed centrally - we simply can't print them off ourselves as in the past without a white border and some of the logo clipped off. This was mentioned at National Council yesterday, as well as through the Events and Education Activities (EEA) sub-committee e-mails.

It does look smart and I assume if we have the borders set for our Word doc, it's easy enough to overprint the name, date, pilot, aircraft etc. at the event, as in the past.

I'll send the draft I've seen.

Peter Anthony · Post by **Peter Anthony** » Thu Mar 13, 2008 4:51 pm

Hello Dave,
By Printing programme what we mean is an Excel programe that does a similar job to the old EAA certificate printer programe.
So that as you print out the certificate it merges the Data entered onto the certificate and that from a pull down menu of the Pilots data so you end up with a spread sheet with the information of the days flying and only have to enter the Young aviators and pilots details once.
At present I'm using a merge from excel to word which is time consuming because you have to enter the details by hand and switch from one to the other to print. If Miss Fee can code this all to work from excel we can speed things up on the day and standardise the information being sent to Penny at HQ
Trying to actually print the certificates is not really practical although the EAA used to do it, they addedd Chapter Logos, although I have an idea that they supply certificates with a blank space to over print the logos nowadays.

Dave Hall · Post by **Dave Hall** » Wed Mar 19, 2008 9:29 pm

Sounds fine - certainly easier than messing with Word in general, though there are more out there who understand its foibles than Excel.

If you only need to set things up to match the official pre-printed certificate, that should make things a bit easier, I guess.

Thanks for the input, Peter.