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Santa Barbara, CA. (May 2025) – The Riviera Ridge School added to their robust Electives program this year with a new offering that really took off - Mini Drones. Led by new JK-8th Grade STEAM Integration Specialist Tracy Williamson, the course added to their robotics studies by featuring the DroneBlocks curriculum. Through this resource, students got the chance to build mini Crazyflie drones and learn to fly them through a variety of challenges and obstacles using a drone flight simulator and block coding. Students also learned how drones are used in real-world scenarios in the air, water, and on land. They even entered a worldwide DroneBlocks competition in which they created a video showcasing their coding and micro-missions.
“Rather than flying the drones with a remote controller, we used the web-based app, DroneBlocks, to code the drones to fly. Students discovered how accurately the drones performed, how the slightest change in air pressure, altitude or obstacles in the room affects a flight, and they did a lot of troubleshooting,” Williamson said. “We incorporated engineering of obstacles and maps and folded in tons of math and science as we measured and calculated distance, predicted flight patterns, and learned how to rebuild a drone after crashing.”