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Summer camp takes to the sky with drones

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Virginia Tech and Wing Aviation welcomes middle school students to participate in Imagination Drone Camp 2022. Campers gain experience in flying different types of drones, building their own drone, and a flying competition. Imagination is a camp hosted by a partnership between College of Engineering, the Center for Enhancement of Engineering Diversity (CEED), Institute for Critical Technology and Applied Science (ICTAS), Wing, and Mid-Atlantic Aviation Partnership (MAAP).
This camp is the Virginia Tech Drone camp. In addition to being able to learn a little bit about drones and the deployment of drones today in the Drone Park. As the week progresses, there'll be working with each of our staff members in building their own kit drones. And then we'll culminate the week a flight opportunity for each of the students to participate in a competition with the drones that they built. We're really excited about the fact that we have focused on trying to make sure that we meet some of the goals of the University of inclusion and diversity. And so we reached out to different communities within Virginia and actually someone within West Virginia to try to bring students here who don't always have the opportunity to work with this type of technology. We started on Monday, we did a lot of flight training with them. So we actually worked on with some DJI drones, which are kinda easier drones to handle. And we went over the basics of control with them. Today I was actually a visual observer with them, so I watched some their flights and kind of helped judge some of the competition. They're coming out here with a lot of different interests levels and a lot of different skill levels. And I'm really trying to make sure that number one, we're looking at each individual case safely and really trying to get the most out of it. Making sure we're engaging each of the students and making sure we're getting them to where the level they need to be at. So all week, the kids have been building a drone and today's the day when they get to see how they fly it. So they're gonna be inside Virginia Tech's Drone Cage, and they're going to have to try to land in a small area in and get points for their team. Their parents are here to be able to watch them fly. And then at the end they get to take their drone home with them and hopefully they'll only get even better at flying it. You know, in the years to come. So for Wing, we're so excited to be part of this, partnering with Virginia Tech in the Mid-Atlantic Aviation Partnership. To be able to, you know, have kids come and experience drones and learn a little bit about what it's all about. The hope here is that we can introduce kids to this technology. They'll become very excited in it and it will become their future careers. And nothing is better than being able to work in an industry that you love. And so by introducing this to the kids, we see this as blossoming into just really good for our industry in the future.