Drone workshop gives Virginia teachers tools to educate the workforce of the future

This is a five-day workshop. It's funded through the National Science Foundation, and with the Virginia Space Grant Consortium. What we're doing is we're providing drone instruction and teaching educators how to operate drones. Participants in this workshop, include community college faculty, high-school teachers, and extension agents. And the idea of the workshop is to train the trainer. So we're training the educators and they're providing training to their students and their stakeholders. Uncrewed aircraft systems or drones are just increasing rapidly. They're being used in nearly every sector from inspection to precision agriculture. And so we're just really excited to be part of this industry and training educators to prepare the future workforce. I've been part of GeoTEd-UAS for two years now. And through that, I got my part 107 training. I'm a part 107 certified drone pilot. We're being taught how to, you know, improve our instruction, incorporate drones into our classes. I specifically do teach drones into class. So it's really good at reinforcing and exposing me to new types of usage of drones. And so it's really providing us with an opportunity to get exposure, meet with people who are doing similar or different things with drones, make connections. You'll be flying lengthwise of the area. There's so much more to learning the technology in this industry than just operating at drone. That's actually just a very small component of it. We're learning about the overall technology that's associated with the drone itself. But they're also learning how to collect data, how to, what types of data they should be collecting, and how to process this data and this imagery to help drive data-driven decisions. We're really on the cutting edge in terms of the training and experience that we're given these educators, these are real-world projects, fly real missions, collecting real data for a real purpose. I mean, it's really, it's great to be a part of.