READY TO COMPETE FOR A SPOT ON THE DRONE RACING TEAM?

Aviation, CTE, and Engaging the Community

Project Description: Last year, our Career and Technical Service Organization (CTSO) met, and the students chose to reach out to and engage the local community. Through this, they wanted to reach out to students in other schools to assess possible shared interest in racing drones.  They raised some basic questions such as, “Is drone racing legal?”, “How does drone racing work?” We received a small grant to buy drones and racing gates, and twelve of our CTE students began training weekly, conducting time trials, repairing drones, flying with VR headsets, and planning for a racing event this school year. What was missing is the equipment and supplies to stand up a competitive drone racing team. We are starting to build, sustain, and deliver an educational drone team to the community for 1-2 years.

Outcomes: Our CTSO and our AFNR Program of Study have a four-year track record of increased student achievement and have created leadership opportunities, demonstrated significant increases in retention, and subsequently improved graduation rates. We have articulated with colleges and taken part in summer educational opportunities. AMA (the Academy of Model Aeronautics) sanctions our CTSO. AMA pioneered educational drones in 2016 and coordinated with MultiPG and Drones in Schools and is now offering a STEM curriculum in educational drone racing. 

My experience over the years is that a drone is “the carrot” that lures youth into the elaborate world of aerial robotics (and other robotics and STEAM learning) by providing a robust and immersive learning experience that simultaneously builds connections to technology career pathways. The incentive of competitive drone racing (formalized into an educational drone racing team) exposes students to technology and hands-on problem-solving opportunities to design, build, modify, and rebuild—employing 21st-century skills and use of technology to meet the demands of today’s workforce. 

We will be able to invite local middle school students to time trials locally; with an out-of-town middle school, we would connect via Zoom and on the VelociDrone Software. The option for both could be a field trip to Corvallis’s final event, hopefully with two other racing chapters there.

His teaching approach is to introduce his students to aviation as a vehicle for learning marine science, and to prominent coastal researchers who become their mentors, and involving his students while conducting ongoing coastal research together.

Contact: chuckg@careertech.us

Teacher and CTE Project Facilitator, Lincoln County School District

Lincoln City Career Tech High School- Coastal Drone Academy

Grade levels: 9, 10, 11, 12

Content areas: Career & Technical, Science, STEM

NATIONALLY CERTIFIED AND LICENSED – 35 YEARS FLYING 25,000 MILES OF COAST MAPPED

…He is a licensed pilot, teacher, and marine scientist-researcher. He co-developed a coastal sensitivity mapping method used by agencies including the United Nations, NOAA, and in many countries today. Dr. Getter has taught at universities, colleges, and high schools while conducting coastal research publishing 3 books, 30 articles based on his flights in Alaska, Washington, Oregon, Texas, Florida, Puerto Rico, and Massachusetts.

DR. GETTER’S DRONE PROGRAM:

Coastal Drone Academy is an aviation educational organization that utilizes student drone (sUAS) pilots who are training and working to attain nationally certifications and licenses to successfully carry out community service projects and who complete projects for tribal, government, and NGO (non-governmental organizations) agencies (collaborators) in several economic sectors typical for the Oregon coast. We are one of the CTE programs in Lincoln City Career Technical High School which is a small public charter school. Our school has articulated with the aviation program at Central Oregon Community College (COCC) since 2015. Together with COCC and Oregon State University (Professional and Career Education), we have helped other high schools and community college teachers use drones in their classrooms. Our program’s purpose is to take a student with little or no experience in aviation through the process of gaining knowledge and proficiencies thus allowing them to safely and legally enter US airspace with an sUAS to conduct useful work for, and under the direction of, our network of collaborating marine scientists, foresters, mariculturists, and natural resource managers. Our sponsors provide a classroom/workshop space, a local air-park and an armory for indoor training, and the use of an FBO (fixed-base operator) at a local airport for training in airport operations. The drone fleet we use for services and course offering was purchased and is maintained under Perkins CTE grants; MWEC (Mid-Willamette Educational Consortium) has sponsored software and technology that allows curriculum development focussed on agriculture and natural resource management; we have numerous grants sponsoring our flight simulators including FTP and Oculus technology. Students carrying out local project-service-based approaches have gained real-world skills. We have developed a dramatically successful dropout prevention strategy that keeps students on track to graduate, and we have significantly increased their college-level opportunities that offer a head start on higher education. Students run a career and technical service organization called Starfleet Academy where “dronies” gather on Fridays to view aviation movies and plan drone racing events. Over the last decade, some of my students have begun careers in aviation; I have taught or mentored pilots who now work with tribal, university, aircraft manufacturing, and armed forces organizations. Many of them stay involved with the Academy as collaborators giving feedback from their jobs in ways to improve and update our program. Several of them have mentored our pilots in moving forward in aviation careers.

READY TO EXPERIENCE THE WORLD OF VR?

Join our second-year dronies as they turn to simulators, flight gaming, and FPV (first-person view) technology to refine their flying skills further. It is truly amazing what 30 hours of simulator time will do for your flying skills.

AV 106 Virtual Reality (Year 2): Lecture: The lectures that lay out the training exercises are an online “ground school” for VR students. Our VR lectures familiarize the students with a suite of VR hardware and software. Labs: The core of the exerience is a gaming computer loaded with a variety of flight exercises. Students attend workshops with an enterprise-grade sUAS flight simulator where they learn to operate the equipment we use in our Missions courses. Students are introduced to MS Flight Simulator 2020 requiring a realistic transcontinental cross-country flight to complete the course. The goal for each student is to develop the skills they need to be successful remote pilots using online training modules.

Fall Term – 0.5 Credit hours in Career & Technical Education (or Electives); Lab Packs and Workshop Simulators Limit Class Size

This is the “capstone” of our course offerings.

Our training and certification program uses a curriculum accepted by the FAA, endorsed by major aviation insurance providers, and evaluated and recommended for college credit by the American Council on Education. Our program is built on three years of ground and flight school using Unmanned Safety Institute curriculum with its aviation emphasis.

Then through experiential, hands-on learning, and collaboration with local marine scientists, our pilots fly missions where they develop knowledge of the several key aspects of coastal resource management, including using drones to for:

• Monitoring protected and endangered marine species and their habitats
• Supporting assessments of fisheries stocks and habitat assessments
• Monitoring effects of climate change, coastal erosion and sea level rise
• Monitoring sea grass and marsh health

This class follows a research-based education module that involves students working on longer-term projects directly with industry partners, building on their knowledge of drones and how they apply directly to their coastal habitat missions. Through research-based learning students can develop the intellectual skills of critical analysis and also valuable transferable skills such as group work, time- and resource-management and data handling.

At this point our pilots have an FAA Remote Pilot Certificate (drone license), are working on a USI Pro rating on at least one flight platform, and have a strong logbook reflecting PIC (pilot in command) time on our most advanced sUAS technologies. Many of our students have now mastered our most advanced equipment and software, and realize a commercial drone pilot is required to manage data and software, that the client often needs their data managed (you are never just a pilot).

This course introduces students to Unmanned Aerial System (UAS) operations using rotary drones including the DJI Matrice 600 quadcopter and the Sensefly eBeeSQ fixed wing drones.Our third year pilots have a log book beginning to bulge with commercial flight time. This year they are assigned the task of carrying out two kinds of missions. The first kind of mission is aerial photography for local city and watershed managers.  Students learn to program and use these flight platforms in this operations course.

The second type of mission is the study of fisheries and wildlife distribution where we conduct low altitude, precision flying, aerial photography, and videography revolving around the programming of an autopilot program called Litchi. We focus on whales and salmon.

This course introduces students to advanced unmanned aerial systems (UAS) mission planning and operation, as they progress to higher level simulation and mission planning/ execution. Lab/Field: Student teams launch, recover and maintain advanced Unmanned Aerial Systems. Current projects are underway and planned in wetlands restoration monitoring, seagrass bed mapping, whale and salmon observation.