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Participants inventory, tear down, rebuild, and learn to fly a classroom drone. This hands-on exercise emphasizes the importance of knowing each part of the drone and its function. Participants complete a timed challenge to assemble the drone from its fully disassembled state and navigate it through an obstacle course.
 

Skills Developed: Identifying parts, fluent teardown/rebuild, battery health and routines, understanding flight axes, twin-stick UAS control scheme, understanding PID control, teamwork with spotter, working under pressure, inventory management, and documentation. 

Participants compete in a 2v2 drone joust that rewards smart flying, power management, understanding of avionics sensors, and diligence in battery maintenance. Participants navigate challenges involving airflow disruption, ground/ceiling effects, and the tradeoff between speed and stability while utilizing optical flow sensors. This exercise promotes the practical application of drone control and teamwork under competitive conditions. 

Skills Developed: Maintainer habits, UAS operation, teamwork, power management. 

Participants autonomously navigate a static series of obstacles using simple command sequences. They plan flight paths, input sequential commands with a block-based IDE, and execute basic autonomous patterns (launch, wait, recover). This exercise emphasizes the importance of proportionality calculations and addresses the challenges of open-loop control. 

Skills Developed: Flight path planning, sequential command input, basic autonomous operation, proportionality calculations. 

Participants challenge each other to piloting or maintainer tasks of their own making. Themes for each day include flying challenges, teamwork challenges, head-to-head challenges, and troubleshooting and repair challenges. 

Skills Developed: Reinforcement of prior unit skills, including piloting, maintenance, teamwork, and troubleshooting. 

Participants work together to lift a payload using only their own drones. This exercise emphasizes mission planning, flight plan development, team coordination, and adapting to unexpected conditions. Students will calculate components of lifting force and understand how to sum and cancel force vectors from multiple sources. 

Skills Developed: Mission planning, flight plan development, team planning, coordinated multi-robot operation, considering risk, adapting to unexpected conditions, calculating relevant components of oblique forces.