Drone Coding

1d: Develop resilience and perseverance when approaching CS and CT learning experiences, build comfort with ambiguity and open-ended problems, and see failure as an opportunity to learn and innovate.

2c: choose teaching approaches that help to foster an inclusive computing culture, avoid stereotype threat and equitably engage all students.
3b: Apply effective teaching strategies to support student collaboration around computing, including pair programming, working in varying team roles, equitable workload distribution and project management.

 Today I explored droneblocks! 

The website has modules you can go through to learn how to take care of, fly, and code these drones correctly. 

Some of the things covered in the modules I looked through today were:

• Safety tips,
• Terminology, 
• Coding, and 
• Some scripted codes.

Some of the safety tips that were staed are very important when using these drone:

• Always pre-check drones before flying,
• Keep plenty of flying space,
• Allowing to many students to fly at one time may lead to collisions,
• These drone do not do well in wind, fans, or heavy air condition,
• MAke sure batteries are inserted properly, and lastly
• One battery is 13 minutes of flight time.

Some of the terminology that was mentioned and explained:

• take off/ land,
• ascend/ descend,
• yaw,
• loops,
• varieable, and
• logic.

What some of the codes look like that include these terms (in the same order as above)

 

Lastly, the few scripted coding that I looked into:

• takeoff();
• fly("up",50,"in");
• fly("down,30,"in");
• land();

It is important to know this information in order to safely code and fly the drones in the correct way. Learning all of this seems like a lot at first, but most of it becomes pretty self explanitory as you move thorugh the modules. I am very excieted to get into exploring the drones themselves as well as the coding to fly them... 

Exploring the flying:

The most difficult part was connecting the drone to our phones. Once It was connected it was easy to fly. However, the drone I used, in particular, was not following the codes. We were able to get it into the air, but it wouldn't fly in any direction, flip, or land. We aren't sure if it was a connection issue, a coding issue, or an issue within the setting. Although it wasn't working propely, it was still an exciting new experience with drones, and trying to code. 

Here is a video of my first flight. 

1d: Develop resilience and perseverance when approaching CS and CT learning experiences, build comfort with ambiguity and open-ended problems, and see failure as an opportunity to learn and innovate.

This standard applies because we were still able to learn and explore the drone even though the coding wasn't working.

3b: Apply effective teaching strategies to support student collaboration around computing, including pair programming, working in varying team roles, equitable workload distribution and project management.

This standard was used becasuse we worked in groups to learn the programming. We distributed the work to find easy ways to explain and help other educators understand the drones enough to teach to elementary students.