Could drones become an important educational tool in the nation’s classrooms?  Some school administrators and teachers think so.  A growing number are allowing their students to experiment with drones in the hopes of spurring greater interest in the science and technology fields.  Some schools are even preparing students to become drone pilots or to train for other vital support roles in the nation’s burgeoning drone industry.

Carrie Robledo, co-founder of Girls Leading Innovation With Drones and Engineering, or GLIDE, is considered a pioneer in the field. When she began introducing drones into her classroom five years ago,  there were few if any  resources available to guide her efforts.  Her instincts told her that her kids would take to drones readily:  UAVs were fun to handle and learning to fly them would be exciting.  By taking drones apart and reassembling them, kids would learn some basic mechanical engineering skills.  And by actually flying UAVs,  they would gain practical knowledge of physics and be exposed to fundamental aerodynamic principles of lift and drag.

She was right. Rather than sit in front of a computer screen, drones encouraged her students to communicate and collaborate and to develop experiential as well as intellectual knowledge.  Her group projects allowed students to appreciate the importance of information sharing and team building.  Students developed fight flans and evaluated the results together.  They reflected on what had gone wrong or right. Students exchanged rules and encouraged each other to improve their skills.  Grading usually depended on what groups had achieved together, not on individual performance alone.

Today, more formal drone curricular resources are available.  Many drone classroom teachers get trained through a program offered by centers like Drone Legends in Marlton, NJ or the Anchorage, AK-based Advanced Aerial Education (AAE).  In 2019, two AAE-trained teachers won approval for a comprehensive, two-year, four-semester drone program at Coronado High School in Colorado Springs.  During the first year students learned to fly, design and build their own drones. In the second year, they received instruction in photography, videography and land surveying. Eventually, they learned how to read aviation maps, studied the effects of weather on drone performance and were tested on FAA drone regulations before getting formally certified to fly commercially.

Schools typically purchase inexpensive unsophisticated drones for students to practice on with mandatory remote piloting during their first year of instruction.  They then move on to larger and more expensive unmanned UAVs to become schooled in more advanced applications to engage in advanced surveying and inspection activities, sometimes in partnership with local companies that need the support.  Some computer programming departments are also getting into drone education, less to teach students the mechanics of flying than to educate them about the IT, GPS and AI systems that underpin drone navigation and data processing.  Not all drone students have ambitions of flying drones.  Some are just as intrigued by the challenge of designing new and more sophisticated applications for them.

Schools adopting drone education programs – the precise number is still unclear, perhaps hundreds, nationwide, primarily at the high school level – report overwhelming support from parents as well as students.  The biggest challenge seems to be ensuring that adequate indoor space exists to fly the drones, especially during the inclement winter months.  While gyms and cafeterias are ideal, Robledo and others report that even large classrooms can accommodate them, with proper planning and adequate storage space.

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