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In this episode of the Discover Drones Podcast, I share with you the audio from the “Getting Started with Drones in STEM Education” webinar in July, 2020.
Getting Started with Drones in STEM Education
Download this episode to listen to the webinar in full. There is a PowerPoint presentation that accompanied this webinar. If you’d like the visual, you can see the webinar on my YouTube channel. Each video is a snippet of the full presentation.
If you’re interested in learning more about Drones in STEM education, please join our Drones in STEM education Facebook group!
Tips for Flying your Drone Outdoors
Additional Sources for Drones in STEM Education Information
Atanasov, M., (2016). Here’s why you should look up for your next career. [online] Available from: http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20160113-heres-why-you-should-look-up-for-your-next-career
Carnahan, C., Zieger, L., and Crowley, K. (2016). „Learning and Teaching in the Digital Age‟ in Drones in Education Let Your Students’ Imaginations Soar, Arlington, VA: International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE), pp. 5-18
Idries, A., Mohamed, N., Jawhar, I., Mohamed, F., Al-Jaroodi, J. (2015). Challenges of Developing UAV Applications: A Project Management View, Proceedings of the 2015 International Conference on Industrial Engineering and Operations Management Dubai, United Arab Emirates (UAE), March 3 – 5, 2015.
Kuzma, J., Robinson, A., Dobson, K., & Law, J. (2018). Practical Pedagogy for Embedding Drone Technology into a Business and Computing Curriculum. Journal of Education and Human Development, 7(3), 1-9.
Getting Started With Drones in STEM Education
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Discover drones is your go to resource for
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learning about drones, drones in business, emerging drone technology
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and drones in STEM education. I am Dr. Heather Monthie, an FAA certificated flight instructor, commercial pilot, remote pilot and dedicated stem educator. Join us as we discover more about drone safety, urban Air Mobility,
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business and education.
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Let’s get started.
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Hi there and welcome back to the second episode of the Discover drones podcast. I’m your host, Heather Monthie. In this episode, I am going to share with you the audio from a webinar that I did on drones in STEM education and just how to get started with drones and STEM education. So this was a webinar that I held for teachers and parents and anybody anyone who is interested in helping to promote STEM education through the use of drones. So it is part of my educators To drone Facebook group that is a free Facebook group that anybody is welcome to join. If you are interested in joining, just go to facebook.com search for educators who drone or you can just type in drones and STEM education. And that group will come right up. So if you want to sign up for future webinars if you just go to fly electric monarch COMM And there is a link right in the menu of the website where you can sign up for webinars. They are not specific to STEM education, but they are specific to drones. So it’s really going to be for anybody who is interested in learning more about drones, using drones and education, drones and business etc. So you can go ahead and sign up there. We’ll be doing another one of those in August of 2020. So I hope you’ll join there. And so just to set the stage a little bit for this webinar. Again, it was a group of teachers and parents that were interested in using drones to help promote STEM education. What we did was is I went through the webinar First there is a PowerPoint that goes with the presentation. If you are interested in seeing the visuals, you can go to fly electric monarch COMM And then look for getting started with drones and STEM education and just type that in there. And that will come right up. And you can see the videos, I chunked it into very small digestible videos versus giving you the full 45 minutes feel. And so at the end of the webinar, we did have time for q&a. And I did not include that in the webinar replay or in this podcast just to protect the privacy of the people involved. You know, we didn’t talk about you’re sharing this information publicly. So I didn’t want to I just wanted to respect everybody’s privacy. So in the future, though, we will be sharing more information, getting more information out there. So let’s jump in to the webinar.
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All right, it is six o’clock. So welcome. Thank you for attending tonight’s webinar, we’re going to be talking about drones in STEM education specifically in K 12 education. We are going to have a few people coming in here. It’s just me running the show tonight. Usually I have somebody helping me with this kind of stuff. So I will be doing the zoom on my own tonight. So welcome. So if you are able to you can go ahead and type your name and where you’re from the chat just to just acquaint yourself with who is here today.
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You’re gonna be able to type in Jeff for some reason. Oh, okay.
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Let me
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I might have shut it off when I set this up. And that’s fine too. We can we can chime in, that’s fine. So just to remind them
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This is being recorded, I’m going to what I’m going to do is I’m going to send out the recording to everybody who was, um, who signed up for the registration, who registered for the webinar tonight. Not everybody was able to make it, I did have a couple people try to log on a little bit earlier. So I think there might have been some timezone mix ups. And something going to be recording this, it is being recorded, I just want to make sure you guys are aware of that. And we’ll have some time for some q&a after the presentation as well. I just want to respect your privacy for everybody that’s on here today. So the first thing I want you guys to do, if you have a phone handy with you, you can take out your camera and scan this QR code. This is going to take you to a website that I put together that’s got a lot of different information and it’s sort of my spot where I’m collecting all sorts of drones and STEM education resources. And we’ll be going through quite a few of those resources tonight. But that’s going to be my spot where I’m just as I find stuff and I’m able to, you know, sort of vet it a little bit. I’ll share it with you guys there. So you can go ahead and scan that QR code that will bring you right to the site. Otherwise, if you don’t have your camera can scan the QR code. You can just go to this website right here. It’s fly electric monarch comm that brings you right to the drones and STEM education. webpage. It’s the most recent blog post that I posted there. So if you scroll down through there, there’s all sorts of different stuff in there that we’re going to go over saying. Okay, so first a little bit about myself. I am My name is Heather Monthie. I live in Phoenix, Arizona. I’m originally from Wisconsin, and I’ve been involved in aviation my whole life. I took a field trip to the airport in kindergarten, and I got hooked on aviation at that exact moment I saw an airplane to do a what I now know is to be a touch and go which is where the pilot will practice takes take off. landed right away. And I was like, I gotta do this. This is exciting. I was obsessed with airplanes ever since then. And then, shortly after I graduated high school, I earned my private pilot’s certificate. And then I went on to earn my commercial pilot certificate along with an instrument rating. And then in 2002, I became a certificate in flight instructor. And most recently, I earned the remote pilot rating as well. I’ve been working in STEM education since 2003. I was I was 100% on the airline pilot track. And then after September 11, happened in the airline industry took a took a turn, I had actually been working on a backup degree in computer science. And so my plan B became my plan A and I went into computer science and worked in the field for a little while. I loved it, but I really just was drawn towards teaching. I went and got my teaching license and I got certified As a Gen Ed instructor in the state of Wisconsin, and also a computer science teacher in Wisconsin, and I also have a PhD in information technology. So I’m working in higher education right now, this is something that I do, sort of on the side is just, you know, I’m very passionate about aviation, STEM education, computer science education. And what I’m seeing right now is, the affordability of drones is allowing sort of two of my loves of life coming together where we’ve got aviation, and then we’ve got computing and technology and those two worlds are coming together. So I do this because I’m just passionate about this and about getting kids interested in computer science, technology, and also aviation. So today, what I wanted to do is talk a little bit about where we have just a high level overview of getting started with drones in education. This is intended to be sort of an introduction to using drones and STEM education. So today, what we’re going to do We’re going to focus on unmanned aerial systems. So drones technically there’s there’s, there’s maritime drones, there’s drones that you can use on land as well. But what we’re talking about here today are drones that you can fly. So there are unmanned aerial systems. And when I’m giving an overview of anything, really, I like to use the who, what, when, where, when, and why sort of frameworks. We’ll talk about those things tonight. And then we’ll talk about some curriculum and where to find different projects. And we’ll talk about some things to think about when you’re looking for the best drones and STEM education. We’ll talk a little bit about the drone, drones and the A and T and steam. And then we’ll discuss the FAA is really an educational use of drones. And then I’ll share with you a couple of different sources that as I was putting together this presentation, I pulled from a couple different pieces of literature as well.
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So the first part of your drone program you want to think consider the who so who’s going to be involved in your drone education program. So who is going to be your school or your districts chief pilot and who’s going to be responsible for your drone program, if your school or district does not have this, it’s probably you. So if you are the one that’s really interested in bringing drones into your school being drones into your district, you’ve got to be that champion for it. And generally, most drone education programs are going to have a chief pilot and that chief pilot is going to be responsible for overseeing the drone fleet, may inventory, maintenance of the drones, all that kind of stuff. So you need to decide who’s going to be doing that for your drone program. And then you also need to decide who is responsible for your drone policy, and even insurance and these could this could really be two separate bullet points right there. So a lot of schools already have drone policies. And so they’ll have a policy saying you can fly drones but you have to go through this process. First. You have to get this approved, all that kind of stuff. Other schools don’t have a drone policy at all, and so it’s kind of up to you to just Decide what that is and work with administrators to try to figure out what’s going to be acceptable for the use of drones in your school or in your in your district. And then also just, you know, what kind of insurance Do you have. So, generally with with drones, you’re going to look at haul and liability insurance to cover the drone itself. And then any sort of injuries or damages that might happen as a result. Sometimes, if you’re if you’re using some of the more that cheaper drones, you know, you might not necessarily have haul insurance, but you want to make sure that you are that you have insurance coverage for any sort of liability. And then you also need to consider who is responsible generally, it’s going to be your IT department, but who’s responsible to allow you to install programming software on your computers or tablets. So I personally I use the Edu drone, you can use a couple of different apps with that drone. You can there’s an app that you can use to control the drone, but there’s a couple different apps that you can actually use to to program the drone. So if you don’t have the ability to install software, you need to work with your IT department to make sure that you’re able to get that software installed.
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And then you need to consider what drones you’re going to use. So first, I mean, do you have drones already to begin with? And if you don’t do what do you need to purchase? And you have to consider budget, what kinds of funding Do you have, if you don’t have any funding, that’s probably a whole separate topic for us that we could go over at a different time. But in funding for a drone program, drones are not cheap. The parts are not cheap. There’s costs involved with running a drone program. So you have to really consider what kind of budget you have. And then you have to consider if the drone that you have is the right drone for why you’re teaching this. So you really have to think about the why before you think about what kind of drones you’re going to use. And we’ll talk about that in just a few minutes. Next, you want to consider where you’re going to fly your drone. So are you going to be fine outside Are you gonna be flying in Have you done a site assessment, you want to make sure that you are looking at the space where you’re going to be flying the drones, and then assessing it for any sort of risks that can be that can be in that area. So in this picture, in this example, we’ve got a couple different basketball hoops there. There’s some trees in the background, there’s a tree right behind the basketball hoop. There’s kids, there’s looks like there’s some kids in the background, there’s people playing. So those are all different things that you want to consider when you’re doing a site assessment and just identifying the areas of any sort of risk. And then you also want to consider if you’re going to fly indoors or outdoors. So for if you’re going to fly your drone indoors, you’ve made this decision, you’re going to fly your drone indoors, there’s a couple different things that you need to consider. So first, you want to choose the right drone. Not all drones should really be flown indoors. There’s some that work better indoors, the Tello edu. Again, that’s one that I use a lot and that is One that once the wind gets above about six knots outside, it’s difficult to maintain positive control the drone, so they fly a little bit better indoors, but then you have some drones that you have that they’re going to be better flown outdoors. So you want to make sure that you’re using the right drone. You also want to check with the building owner and you want to make sure that drone flight is actually even permitted. If you do school or district you want to check to make sure that it’s it’s permitted to fly the drones inside. But if you’re running sort of like an after school club or a youth group club, something like that something through a church, you want to make sure that drone flight is permitted inside the building. Again, you want to determine any sort of limited limitations that are on your insurance plan and Do you even have insurance you want to you want to consider them as well. And then you need to consider the legal liability if someone is injured or if the property is damaged. So you have to again understand that risk before you decide where you’re going to fly your drone. school school auditoriums, Indonesians are really great places to To fly drones, but they oftentimes they have obstacles that you might not necessarily think about. So when you walk into a, you know, school gymnasium, you walk in there and you’re not necessarily looking up at the ceiling to see what kinds of things are out there. So when you’re doing the site assessment, you want to make sure to look up to see what’s up there. So in this picture that I have right here, this basketball court, for example, I see a couple different obstacles. And so we’ve got the actual basketball hoop itself on the back board. But then there’s the hoop, we could get caught up in the hoop. And then above the basketball hoop, there’s the the cabling mechanism that is actually allowing the basketball hoop to be drawn up or drawn down. And so it’s probably extending out of the picture, but I’m assuming that there are cables then that extend all the way up to the ceiling to power that to power that basketball hoop. So those are all going to be different things that you want to consider. So you want to when you’re doing a site assessment, just make sure you look up
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and then when you are flying your drone in versus Well, there’s a couple more things. So you want to make sure the room is prepared, remove any obstacles. So again, do a site assessment, do a quick walk around, make sure you’re looking for all the different areas that could be a potential risk. You can also use a flight cage that will help limit the drone movement. And even this the speed so a drone cages, it’s essentially a net that you can you can set up and you can, it’s like a cube shape, and you put the drone inside the cage. And then the person stands outside and the group of people can stand outside and watch. And then what happens is it contains the drone. So somebody might not accidentally just walk into it or walk into the blades, stuff like that, or somebody loses control the drones. It’s all contained within the cage. safety, safety, safety. So aviation is very much filled with a culture of safety. And specifically the FAA, if you’re if you’re in the United States, the FAA is a big proponent and a big advocate of aviation safety and so When you are, and this goes for flying outside outside too, but when you are flying your drones, you want to make sure that you’re building that culture of safety within the group of students that you’re working with. You want to make sure that they understand that anybody can say stop. Anybody can call for flight. If anybody sees anything, they have full permission to stop. So you really want to make sure that you’re building in that culture of safety with your students. And along with that, you want to make sure you’re using propeller guards. A lot of the propellers are either carbon fiber fiber, they don’t feel like a lot when you’re just kind of touching them and playing around with them and stuff. They don’t feel like a lot when they’re rotating you and how many thousands of RPMs they can be very dangerous and they can be very harmful to humans. And then you if your drone has a return to home feature, you want to make sure that you disable that inside, simply because you don’t want to act you want to enable that and then the drone tries To return to home and you had a crash in the wall, and then you could also use the beginner mode to help reduce speed. So like, again, I use the telo. edu, there’s a, there’s a beginner mode in there, that how it reduces the speed of the top speed at which the drone will actually fly. And if you have chosen to fly your drone indoors just because the weather is poor, sometimes it’s just better to wait till the weather outside clears up. So for example, you know, it’s snowing outside and you can’t take the can take, take the drones outside to fly, you make the decision to bring the drones indoors, but you can’t find an acceptable place indoors to fly. It’s sometimes it may just be better to go on to plan B, I always say I’ve been a technology educator for a long time, you always want to have Plan B, so that might be a good time to use that. Next, if you’re going to fly your drone outdoors, there’s a couple different things you’ll want to consider. So you want to consider things such as powerlines and trees. Same thing as when you’re doing a site assessment inside you want to look Just look up, see what kinds of things are going to be in the way powerlines trees, cranes, flag poles, all that kind of stuff can get in your way. Then the next thing you’re going to want to do so when you’re flying your drone inside, and if you’re in the United States, the FAA does not have authority over the airspace inside a building. So you do not need FAA approval or authorization to fly drone inside a building. You need authorizations and approvals from other people, but not the FAA. When you move outdoors, the FAA does regulate the airspace outdoors, and that includes the airs 10 feet above the ground, five feet above your house, you know, just right outside your garage door. The FAA controls all the nurses they have the authority over that airspace. So what you can do is there’s a couple different apps and a website that I want to share with you today and the links to these are on that, that website that they need. He initially told you about. The first app is called before you fly. And this app is an app that was designed
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to create this app to make it easy for remote pilots to look at airspace and where they are and make a determination if there’s any sort of rules or regulations that they need to consider with where they want to fly. It’s not like it’s not a full, full full blown, you know, like aeronautical chart or anything like that. It’s a very simplified version of the airspace to help remote pilots understand what the airspace looks like where they’re trying to fly. What it does not do is it does not give you airspace authorization or what is called a lance authorization to fly your drone. So say you are in controlled airspace, you determine that you are in controlled airspace, and you need to have FAA authorization to fly your drone, you can use the Kitty Hawk app. So Kitty Hawk also developed this, but it’s called the Kitty Hawk app. And the Kitty Hawk app will allow you to file a lance request so you can get an authorization to fly your drone. One thing that’s very important to understand is that airspace consists of control controlled, and uncontrolled airspace, and you’re not going to necessarily know just by looking around your your community and seeing Okay, well, this airport has a control tower. So I’m guessing I’m in controlled airspace, you’re not going to know that. There’s, there’s a lot of airports in this country that don’t have a control tower, but they’re still in controlled airspace. So you don’t want to use that as sort of your your gauge to figure out if you’re in controlled or uncontrolled airspace, you want to use one of these two apps to figure that out. The kittyhawk app then is will will allow you to Request a lance authorization. However, there the FAA is slowly rolling this out to all the different airports and all the different controlled airspace areas in the country. And so there are certain airspace that do not. They don’t qualify yet for Lance authorization. So when you’re looking at it, you’ll see, you’ll see like a ring where the airspaces but then there’ll be a grid and it’s sort of like grayed out because Lance authorizations aren’t available just yet. So when you find that what you have to do is you have to file an airspace authorization request at FAA drone zone. And so that website is also linked on the post I originally mentioned. So you also want to consider that your drone needs to be registered outdoors, any drone over 250 grams and 55 pounds needs to be registered as an as an unmanned aerial system. There are drones that if they are under 250 grams, and you’re using them under Part 107. They do need to be registered. Once you’ve determined what the FAA has to say about your drone flight, then you also want to consider any sort of local ordinances that you may have in your city, your Hoa, your county, or even your state. So there are some states that are now in the United States anyways, that are requiring an additional certification above and beyond the remote pilot certification. And there are also some places that are saying you can’t fly your drone here, you can play your drone there, that kind of thing. The This is sort of an area right now that is new to a lot of people as drones are becoming more and more affordable. And more and more people are flying them. More and more people are getting involved and they’re trying to put in some regulations around airspace, but they don’t control it. They don’t have authority over airspace the FAA has authority over airspace. So what allow local or Local governments are doing so state, county and city governments, what they’re doing is they’re saying, okay, we can’t control the airspace, but what we can do is we can say you cannot launch your drone from here, or you cannot land your drone here. So what you want to do is you want to make sure that you’re paying attention to any sort of local ordinances that might be an effect of where you are trying to fly your drone. And then if you are, you know, running, running a youth group and you know, you’ve got an activity that you want to do, make sure you have a backup indoor location for inclement weather, it’s, you know, when you’re flying outdoors, oftentimes it’s a good idea to have a backup indoor location. But sometimes that can be difficult with scheduling especially if you know you want to use the gymnasium but also another teacher wants to use a gymnasium that could be very difficult. So again, I was just go back to always have a plan B when you’re teaching anything with technology, always have a plan B.
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And then next you want to consider when Will you fly your drones. And so I think this picture here is a great representation. I don’t think you’re necessarily going to be flying drones with kids quite this young. But it goes to show that you know that kids love being outside but it’s storming or snowing or whatever they love being outside, they love playing in it, but your drone necessarily doesn’t want to be flown in that kind of weather. So you want to consider when you’re going to be flying your drone so if you live in a climate where it’s you know, it’s it’s cold in January, you obviously want to take that into consideration with Are you going to be flying your drones outdoors, you want to consider that there’s there’s some performance limitations or performance things that happens to the performance of the of the drone when you’re flying in colder weather and then drill performance can also be affected if you’re flying your drone in in hot humid weather as well. So you want to take that into consideration. And, again, just if you’re flying your drone outdoors, just double booked an indoor location if you’re available, available, and then one The one of those issues can be the timing and scheduling of indoor space. So now you want to consider why you’re teaching your students about drones. I think that one thing that can happen very easily when you’re teaching any sort of technology is to get stuck in that this is just cool. This is a fun thing to do. Kids love it, we’re going to teach it because it’s cool, right? And you don’t want to do that. And I think any educator knows that there’s got to be a purpose, there’s got to be an objective for anything that you’re teaching your class, you’ve got a lot of you got a lot of things you’ve got to fit in the day. So you’ve got to make sure that this has a purpose and an objective. And so even if you’re running a you know, an after school program, or youth group, same thing, you want to make sure that you are considering why you want to teach your students about drones, what is the purpose for it, and so I like to break it up into four different areas. I think there’s a couple other areas you can do but this at a very high level. You are some good categories of what you can consider when you are teaching students about drones. So do you want to teach them how to build drones? Are you teaching them how to take individual parts, put them together and assembly them to create and build a drone? Do you want to teach your students how to program a drone? You want to teach your students how to fly drone? And then do you want to teach your students about the certification requirements to become a commercial remote pilot. So it’s also very important to understand that as of right now in the United States, hands on flying experience is not required in order to pass the FAA part 107 certification. So we’ll talk about that a little bit more towards the end here. So the first part is building drones. So if you have decided I want to teach students how to build drones. These are the objectives I want to I need to meet by and I’m going to meet those by teaching students how to build drones. There’s a couple different ways you can do it. And one is to buy a kit. You can buy kits where all the parts are given to you and you can put them together there’s instructions on how to put them together you assemble them yourself and or you students assemble some of them yourself and puts it all together turns it on flies it.
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The other thing that I know I was very much guilty of this when I was a kid is take a ready made drone and just break it down take it apart yourself, I put an exclamation by that simply because you know that there’s always that risk, I guess. You taking it apart, putting it back together and then it doesn’t work. So it’s like it’s kind of like when you buy a sleeping bag or a camping tent, you can never fit it back in the original bag that you got that you bought with it. So sometimes that can happen with with anything electronics, so you want to take that into consideration there. You can also create one of your own and this is This is a little bit more difficult. You can go out to different websites and different different different parts companies and you can just source the parts yourself. And so you can buy the controller you can buy, you know all the wires, you can buy the cabling, everything, you can buy all this stuff, just piece sort of piecemeal it together. And then you just build and create one of your own. And then the last one here that I have here is that you can get ideas from hackster.io. And so that website is a fantastic website. I have a link to it in the webpage that I shared with you earlier. And I think the link tank takes you to drone Arduino projects. And so what happened after that i o is it’s a website where like hardware engineers, software engineers, they all write projects of things that you can do buying very affordable parts. And it’s sort of this like recipe of like how to put this together you it’s you know, it’s like if you’re making chili or something at home and you get a recipe you get all the different ingredients. And they teach you exactly how to how to put it together and how to make it your own right. So that’s the way hackster works is they’ll give you a drone. So you have Arduinos you want to teach students how to build drones with Arduinos. But you’re not quite sure how to do it, you just go there type in drone Arduino, a bunch of different stuff will come up. it’ll, it’ll give you links to all the different parts that you that you need to buy. And then it’s got all the instructions for a lot of times they have videos of how to do it. So that’s a really great website for you to get some get some sort of step by step procedures of how to build drawings based on the parts that you have you I’ve also I also typed in Tello Edu drawn in there, and there was some, some sort of there’s hacking projects in there. And then there was also using Amazon echo.to control the drone, so there’s some pretty great and fun activities there. And then the next thing is to just use your public library or use your school library these are this is an example of a couple books. I actually check these books out right before we went on the quarantine. So that’s what I was reading for a couple of weeks. And the first part of the quarantine, my Library’s been closed. So I haven’t returned them yet. But this is that’s also a great place to go to find some good information about how to build drones. Now, next part is the fly or are coding. So I lumped coding into the teen stem. So if you’re not familiar with the term stem is science, technology, engineering and math. I love coding into the teen stem. Some people call it stem plus C, which is computing, doesn’t it? You know, that’s not really the point of the conversation today. But you can teach coding with drones. And there’s a couple of different things that you can use to do coding with drones. And the first one is drone blocks and I’m sure that many of you have heard of drum blocks before. I do have a link to them on that website as well. I’m an affiliate with them. And so if you purchase full disclosure, if you purchase from that link, I get a little commission and help support the cost of running the software of my website. So Dropbox is a, it’s run on a an online learning management system. And they have 11 different courses that you can use using their app. So they developed an app called the drum blocks app. And you can do block coding with it. You can do Python coding, you can do JavaScript, and a couple of other things you can do with it. And so you can get started out the first like the introduction to tell drone programming. This is for grades four through eight, but I went through it, I think it’s just really good. It’s a really good introduction to programming drone. So if you’ve got a programming background, but you’re not necessarily in the context of drones, it gives you that that background and I believe that when is free, they have a couple free courses on it that you can try first as well.
32:04
So drum blocks again, they’ve got 11 different courses, there is a link to a blog post in that article that I shared with you at the beginning of this webinar, there’s a link to my blog post in there, right kind of give you this review of all the different courses that are in Dropbox and what I as an educator kind of think the order should be should be done in and ways that you can sort of put together that scope and sequence so make sure you check that out. And then there’s some other things that you can do with coding. So if you have parrot drones are Arduinos you can use Tinker or Kota kid, Tinker was actually giving away some other coding curriculum. When all the schools went remote in in spring, Tinker was giving me the coding curriculum for free. That also included some drone programming curriculum. I did check earlier this week, though, to see if they were still offering it up for free and if they’re not as of right now. That may change, but you can check out Tinker. And then coda, Ken has some coding curriculum available as well if you’re using Arduino, so those are really great ones to check out as well. And then if you’re talking about steam education, so science, technology, engineering, art and math, you can bring drones and art together. And I think there’s a couple of different great ways that you can do that. So I shared a couple of ideas here. One thing that I want to say when we were trying to you know, when we were first starting to use the term steam education and people there was like, What does the AI really mean? And before it was sort of accepted on that it was going to be art, I was trying to get it to push to be aviation. So in my head, sometimes I still say aviation. So the ANC so drones and art we can again, you can go back to drill box. They have it’s a it’s a drone dance type course in there. And what that does is it teaches you how to perform Grab the drone so you can choreographic with with music. So you can you can put together choreography, have the drone do certain things and it will follow along with the beat of the music. So I thought that was really cool. I thought that was a really great way to integrate drones and art together. Some other ideas are to teach your students about drone video, and photo production so the students can capture some aerial images and videos, and then you can help them learn how to use digital editing software to create video productions. You can do this with the telo Tello edu or any drone really with that has a camera. Another idea is to create paintings from aerial images. So students go out and collect some aerial images and then they could create paintings. They can use colored pencils, whatever, but they could they could create those images from their aerial images. And that means you’re getting into a little bit more higher, higher tech, software and higher tech thrones You there’s a piece of software called pix 4d. And this is some software that you can use for 3d modeling, you’re getting a little bit more advanced skill sets here. But this is definitely something to look into if you’re if you’re teaching 3d modeling and you want to, and you have a budget for that technology.
35:19
So what I did is I put together an example six week unit and this is you know, really not taking into consideration any age, or how much time you have a student This is just sort of like if I had to give if I had a chunk of time, with with students probably grades like six through 12. This might be how I would break it out and try to give them a little bit of everything just as an introduction to kind of see where they might be interested. So I focused on the code, the fly and the part 107. So I always say, you know, the week the week before you get started, you want to build that excitement, you show some videos, you’ll have a bonus Have something that’s really trying to build that excitement for your students. And then week one, I would say to go over safety procedures versus the, you know, the kind of the boring stuff, but it’s also very important information for the students to have. And it also helps to solidify that culture of safety right away. But then you also want to give them an introduction to flight. So when you’re teaching people how to fly manned aircraft, you get them in an airplane right away, you get them excited, it motivates them, it helps to to show them what they’re working towards. So you don’t necessarily have to go let them all fly their drones right away and be one but you could do a demo flight, you can have just a couple of students who have done well with it, you can have them do a demo flight, really to help build that excitement and to solidify what it is that they’re working towards. And then week two, I you know, if you’ve taught any coding before, if you’ve done any coding, the first project anybody does with any sort of programming languages is typically called the Hello World project. And it’s just a Very simple program to get up and running and going and just make it work right. And so we always you always have an output hello world onto the screen. So what I have seen a lot of in Roblox uses this too. And I’ve seen a couple other people use this as well is sort of the first thing with the drone tele drone is the hotel. So you would just get started there with coding and week to maybe do some block coding. You can do the introduction course you could do the advanced course, depending on how much time you have with the students. It’s really just going to depend. And then week three, you could go into JavaScript or Python just depending on what it is that you’re teaching in your class. what do students already know what do they have some basic knowledge of over already and then in week four, then you start getting into flying the drones. So one thing I like about the Tello Edu drone is that it comes with an app that you can use on your phone and you control you can fly the drone using like joysticks on the touch screen of your phone. It’s kind of weird, because it’s flat on your phone. But what you can do is you can get a Wi Fi game controller. And and I can find the list. But there’s a list online of all the different game controllers that work with the Edu drone. And so what you can do is in week four and five depend, it doesn’t matter what’s going to happen in week four and five, you can actually be flying the drones versus doing the core coding to fly the drones. So they’re, they’re doing a hands on play with it. So you could do some basic flight maneuvers in week four. So you’re gonna introduce them to some some basic principles of flights, you’re going to introduce them to climbs, descends, rolls, pitch bank, all that kind of stuff. You can talk a lot about, you know, the four forces of flight which are lift, weight, thrust and drag, you can talk about that and do some maneuvers to help demonstrate what those look like in flight. And then just some basic maneuvers that you can have them flying around in squares, just getting used to using them. controller and and maneuvering around the drum, then week five, you could go into some more advanced maneuvers. So this is going to be things like climbing turns and you know, spiraling descents and things like that putting out obstacles that the students need to fly around, fly through, fly under fly over, you know, just just getting that more advanced skill set with flying the drone.
39:26
And then Week Six, again, this is really going to depend on the age group because you know, the part 107 you have to be 16 in order to take that exam students, students are 15 years old, you know, they can certainly get started studying for that. But the part while seven is the commercial remote pilot certificate that the FAA offers, so you could introduce them to it. You You’re not going to get through all that material in a week. I’m assuming you don’t have you know, good solid chunk of 12 to 15 hours with students in a week. But you could certainly introduce it, and that students could research different careers using drones. So it’s not just He’s just I’m going to become a drone pilot. I’m gonna fly around, john. That’s not always what it is. Drones are very much used. People take their other skills and bring drones into that. So you’ve got people that work in insurance, and they and they bring drones into that you’ve got people who are photographers, and they bring drones into that filming. Filming movies now, we’re not using helicopters as much anymore. We’re using drones for this. Way back in the day, I used to fly aircraft, manned aircraft to help take help take pictures and help take police officers around and take pictures. Now that all that can be done with drones nowadays, so you can have students research all the different types of careers, that they’re not necessarily just becoming a drone pilot. It’s a different career that could use drones as part of that career. And then the FAA is ruling on the educational use of drones. I’ve given you a website here. There’s also a link to it on the website. The FAA is really working very hard trying to help provide some guidance on and safety regulations on using drones. And like I said, as they become more and more affordable, there’s just more and more people using them. And they really want to help make sure that that airspace is safe for both manned and unmanned aircraft. And so there are really three different distinct users of drones in the FAA s eyes. The first is recreational users of drones. These are people that are flying purely for hobby, they, they are flying under sort of the guidance of what is called a community based organization. The big one is the AMA, or the Academy of model aeronautics. They put together sort of the safety guidelines for flying as a recreational drone pilot. The second type of drone drone user is a commercial remote pilot. So that’s going to fall under Part 107. That’s that’s going to be groups of people who are flying for compensation or higher. And it’s important to understand that that compensation doesn’t necessarily have to be monetary. So if you are if you’re getting, you’re getting the flight time, you’re doing a favor for a buddy and you’re getting the flight time, that could be considered compensation. Your friend is a realtor and he or she wants you to take some pictures of their other real estate property that could be considered for compensation or higher, it’s in furtherance of a business. So that could be considered comp for compensation or even if you’re not charging them. So it’s sort of this very gray area and you want to trust that water lately. And then the third user of drones is concerned the educational users of drones. So what the FAA said about the educational users of drones is that they can either fly under the recreational guidance or under Part 107 there are some specific guidance for higher education that are using drones for research. And that’s outside of the scope of this, we’re focusing on k 12 here. So essentially, what you want to know is that you have to really consider what kind of flying you’re going to be doing with your students. So your students are going to be doing the majority of the flying, you’re not touching the controls, you might have to grab them here and there just for safety reasons. You don’t necessarily need the part 107 as of right now, that could change. But if you’re going to be teaching, you’re teaching students how to fly a drone, your your hands are on the controls quite frequently, or you’re teaching them how to get the part 107 certification. That’s where that’s where you start getting into the part one of seven operations. So you can look through that website there. The FAA really clearly Well, they spell everything out. It’s very well summarized, they have links to the actual laws as well. You can go look those up as well. I’m not a lawyer. I’m a flight instructor. So I speak from that Sort of perspective.
44:03
And then again, the FAA part 107 certificate, I’ve got this nice picture here, because this is where we’re going, we’re going to drone delivery and all these different types of things that we can use with drones. And so the FAA has created this part 107 certificate for all commercial drone operations. And that certificate is what it is. It’s a multiple choice computerized test that you go to a testing center and you take the exam. It’s all multiple choice. And they’re testing you on a couple of different areas. They test you on your knowledge of airspace, they test you and your knowledge of safety, how to read weather reports, aeronautical decision making, how to determine if you’re safe to fly, all that kind of stuff. They just want to ensure that you understand the airspace in which you’re going to be operating. And then this right here, I will post this in the Facebook group. This is a couple of different research articles and a book I found that I thought was great as I was putting together my notes and ideas just from my own experience, this kind of this kind of gave me some additional ideas and different things to look at. So I thought maybe you guys would like to look at this as well.
45:16
Alright, so there you have it. This was the Getting Started with drones and STEM education webinar from July of 2020. Again, if you’re interested in joining our future webinars specific to drones in business and education, go to fly electric monarch COMM And you can sign up right there for the webinar series. And I will see you in the next episode.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
