I'm trying to imagine what a bunch of teenagers could do today to get a similar sense of accomplishment. Note that they weren't even doing particularly well at grade school.
The pavement was vast in all directions and educational buildings had been placed on or alongside it, all parking was on existing tarmac.
Anyway, in Mechanical Engineering our senior project was a gyrocopter.
It was pretty much like somebody had a broken one just sitting around doing nothing, a student brought it in like it was "show & tell" and the decision was made to launch. It didn't come in at the beginning of the year.
I did graduate a bit early and never did get to see much of the progress.
Are there any pictures of this project in your possession?
We knew we were privileged in many ways while realistically being experimental test subjects in all other courses ourselves, with hindsight even more so than was obvious at the time.
We gathered around it for a couple weeks and soaked in the awesome challenge, then the curriculum pivoted to studying all about this type of craft because nobody wanted to make a wrong move. Who else had runways to work with? We found out it had been assembled from a kit and might not have had very much flight time if any before getting slightly damaged.
It was accepted as a multi-year project and the only real work done when I was still there was to straighten out the wheels. Experts were going to be arranged so the restoration would be done like the kit was supposed to be and they were looking for an experienced test pilot.
Never did find out if it got off the ground, but I still learned a lot just having it where we could check it out in such detail.