Wrangell High School students Kiara Harrison (at the controls) and Terra Hoyt fly a drone over the water at City Park, part of a class presented simultaneously in several communities across Alaska on Saturday. In addition to the online instruction in operating drones, Brian Reggiani came to Wrangell from the University of Alaska Fairbanks to work with the students.
High school students reached new heights with a university Upward Bound program.
"We started out with some basic drones ... getting the basic mechanics down," said student Terra Hoyt. "Now we're doing these Mavic Minis and Mavic Pros that are kind of more on an intermediate level, and have things like camera footage and stuff like that."
Using small Tello drones in the high school gym, and later bigger Mavic drones, several Wrangell High School students spent their Saturday learning the basics of using drones. The class was organized by teacher Heather Howe, and lead by Brian Reggiani, of the University of Alaska Fairbanks.
The drone class was presented simultaneously across several communities, with some of the instruction via Zoom, Reggiani said. Students participated in Wrangell, Seward, Chevak and Shishmaref. It's part of UAF's Upward Bound program.
"Upward Bound is a program at UAF that's designed to get students interested in coming to college," Reggiani said. "Our philosophy is that the best way to prepare students for college is to give them a reason to come." The idea is to engage students based on their interests and "highlighting college as a way for students to basically meet their goals."
Saturday's class focused primarily on the basic mechanics of flying drones, Reggiani said, but flying safely and ethical considerations of using drones were also covered in class.
It's also about learning, Howe said. "The foundation is in a growth mindset, so learning through failure and continuing to try, and as you stumble you learn," she said.
"They're really supposed to be looking at telling a story of their community and sharing that with other communities around the nation," Howe said. "So that's kind of the idea behind the drones themselves."
Later in the class, students were given the opportunity to fly camera drones to get footage of Wrangell, and to make a short video of what makes their town special. They ran out of time to make the videos by the end of the day, Howe said, but it was still a good learning experience.
"I would like students feeling confident to use these drones to be change-makers in their communities," Reggiani said. "The end goal of this project is to teach students how to fly drones, so that they can start community impact projects with them in the future. Local mapping is important, videography is important, those are the two main things I can see happening this summer. We have a few students participating in our summer program who will be doing things like this all summer."
The 13 Wrangell students who took the class spent half the day at the high school and half out by City Park.
"I know there's a couple people in town who do it quite often (fly drones) and I just wanted to learn more about it so I might be able to do it in the future," said student Kiara Harrison. "I think it's a really cool opportunity and I'm really grateful for the people who set it up so we can do it."
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