Drone Coding Lab

ISTE Standards:

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.

5.3bApply effective teaching strategies to support student collaboration around computing, including pair programming, working in varying team roles, equitable workload distribution and project management.

5.4b Design authentic learning activities that ask students to leverage a design process to solve problems with awareness of technical and human constraints and defend their design choices.

Helpful Notes From The TelloDrone Vidoes

• Rules:
•  Do NOT fly the drones over others heads.
• Be aware of what other drones are in the air around you.
• Account room for some error.
• Be sure you have enough space for the drones path.
• HAVE FUN!!  

• When working with the TelloDrones, you will be using the block codes. These codes will allow you to see the command that you are wishing to have to drone conduct. This is just one way of coding that you can use, but is great for beginners. 
• When programing the drone, you want to always start with a "take off" block...

• Then, you can choose which of the "navigation" blocks you would like to have your Drone complete. You can choose from any of the following...

• When starting out, you will probably want to just stick to the "navigation" codes in order to learn what you are telling your drones to do. This will allow both you and your students to get a better understanding of the commands. 
• Of course when landing the drone, you are going to want to insert the "land" command.

Lesson Plan For Students

1. Go over the rules for the Tello Drones to ensure safety in the classroom. 
2. Allow the students to either watch the introductory videos on their own, or watch them as a class. Afterwards, discuss the what they have learned.
3. Once this is done, allow the students to start playing with the code and the simulators. This will give the students a way to better interact with their code before introducing the actual drone itself. 
4. You could also give students a task to complete and then have them show you their codes as they problem solve to figure out the task. 
5. One activity you could have them do is make a square. There is a couple correct ways that you could program a square, but here is one as an example. 

       

         6. Another activity that you could have the student complete is allowing them to flip at each corner                 of the square...

        7. Once your whole class starts to get the hang of coding with the simulators, you can allow them to                now use the drones. They can use the same codes they were using on the simulator, and see how                  the drode itself will react with code. 

        8. The last activity that you could have your students due is to create a synchronized code with all of              the other groups. This will allow them to collaborate and work together as a class. This will also                  allow them to troubleshoot anything that any of the groups are having a hard time understanding. 

Conclusion 

    By allowing your students to work independently with code before having them work in small groups, we are encouraging them to troubleshoot on their owns. This will allow the students to grow and learn things on their own. When it comes to haveing them work together, you are encouraging group work and problem solving. Overall, the drones create a fun new way fro students to interact with coding and get a good handle on the foundations of coding.