21st CENTURY SKILLS THROUGH DRONES
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are driving one of the most exciting areas of innovation today. Pilots, engineers and entrepreneurial leaders are teaming up to change the way we think of videography, disaster recovery, agriculture, conservation, marketing and so much more. The ultimate Ten80 UAV Challenge is to apply lessons-learned through the curriculum to tackle team-based challenges that parallel some of these innovative drone applications.
Download the UAV / Drone challenge flyer
Curriculum Overview
Students fly, configure, reverse engineer, design, build and code.
After an introduction to drone safety and regulations, students systematically improve performance through Good Investigation Practices (GIP) and the application of aeronautics principles. Students then learn about major features of drone hardware, and about the local and global infrastructure that supports drone activities. Software and coding round out the experience as students program their drones to perform tasks. As a culminating challenge, students apply lessons-learned to showcase their piloting, programming, troubleshooting and teamwork skills.
An optional Hacker’s extension guides students through a series of focus lessons that reverse engineer how each system of the UAV brain works. The culminating challenge is to replace the stock system with a customized Arduino-based flight controller.
As with all Student STEM Challenges, these concepts and skills are cultivated through the framework of innovation. Students model a business or organization that applies the technology to improve society.
