Susan Hegeberg, assistant principal of Aviation High School, has been recognized as one of the nation's most innovative educators as part of the ING Unsung Heroes award program.

Representatives of ING presented Hegeberg with a check for $2,000 at a recent school assembly. She is one of 100 educators honored as an Unsung Hero this year.

The award money will be used to fund Hegeberg's innovative idea, "Flight by Design."

In this four-year program, students will design an aircraft.

During the process, they will grapple with design flaws and errors, deal with limited resources, meet deadlines, and navigate setbacks in the course of their work.

The project will begin in ninth grade with students creating, designing, and testing structural efficiencies of wing beams. In tenth grade, they will explore manmade and biological wing shapes.

As eleventh graders, they will investigate propulsion systems and on-board and telemetric data collection systems. During their senior year, students will leverage their knowledge to design, build, test, modify, and retest their planes.

In the course of the four years, they will learn skills that will make them better mathematicians, scientists, and engineers.

"I want to help students make sense of concepts and solve complex problems," said Hegeberg. "Learning what doesn't work is often as valuable as learning what does work."

Aviation High School is a unique 400-student public school in which college-prep coursework is taught through the lens of aviation and aerospace.

It draws students from across the Puget Sound area. For more information, see www.aviationhs.org

ING is a financial services company based in Atlanta.