Flight for education

Mission No. 1 accomplished. Nine North Idaho educators successfully landed their drones in the performance showcase Wednesday at the North Idaho College campus after a three-day training through PCS Edventures, funded through grants by the Idaho STEM Action Center. Their next mission: to pass their knowledge on to students.

“This is really exciting to me because all of middle school is so important,” Jeromy Swanson from Post Falls Middle School said. “Sometimes as a middle school and high school student you just don’t know how this is going to be applicable in life and I think this is exciting because it’s where we can talk.”

The teachers spent the three days starting Monday in a classroom with hands-on drone work leading up to the final showcase on Wednesday. Topics covered included operating, designing codes and use of drones in today’s society. Tyler Downey, a training coordinator for PCS Edventures who led the session, said they get the most requests for drone training of all their STEM products.

“Being an autonomous flying robot basically makes (drones) very compelling,” Downey said. “Students of all backgrounds can connect pretty easily to it in a way that they just can’t to other types of technology.”

Downey said drones operate and are controlled in a way that is very similar to video games and so lots of kids are more comfortable with drones than other types of technology.

The class focused on design and drones used in current situations such as theatrical and video-related performances. For the showcase, the teachers had to create a performance that included choreography to music and costumes.

“That was fun because that twist made it apply I think to a wider community,” Swanson said. “It’s a really exciting place to solve problems and you can just see your code in action.”

To create a flight, the operator uses an app and selects a block (a prewritten code) that tells the drone where to move. Several of these blocks lined up create a flight pattern that is ready to perform once the operator launches the mission. However, it takes some attempts and reworking to land a successful mission. More advance operating would include the operator creating their own codes for the mission.

“It was fun but it was a lot of perseverance and working through problem-solving,” Kim Simmons, a teacher at Clearwater Valley Elementary School, said. “It’s a lot of trial and error.”

To meet the costume requirement, the teachers attached materials to a plastic cage on the outside of the drone. Each item had to be weighed to make sure it didn’t exceed the weight limit for each drone. Then they reworked the choreography to make sure the materials wouldn't get caught. Teachers also received classroom kits so they have the materials to pass on the knowledge to their students.

“There’s going to be jobs in this world of drones that we don’t even know about yet,” Swanson said. “As a middle schooler or a high schooler, if you got some experience with that, in solving problems with drones or solving problems with coding, then you got a good foot in the door for what that position could be.”

According to the Idaho STEM Action Center, 19 of Idaho's 20 hot jobs through 2026 require STEM skills, and STEM jobs pay about twice as much as non-STEM jobs.

“The STEM ed careers are just exploding,” Swanson said. “As I imagine what the world will look like in 20 years, there are going to be so many roles in STEM-related careers that it would be an absolute disservice to not have kids working and solving problems in STEM-related activities. So that’s what excites me most about it, giving kids access to problems and STEM-related activities that they could then apply to whatever they chose to do in their lives.”