Integrated STEM Helps Drone Education Fly

The emerging drone industry presents an ecosystem rich with STEM careers. This paper discusses the development of an integrated STEM curriculum, the Drone Innovators Program, designed to immerse middle school and high school students in STEM careers through drone education. A work in progress curriculum presented in this paper is a series of creative problem-solving online micro-courses for both online schools and brick-and-mortar classrooms. The curriculum is being piloted in an online charter school that serves students throughout the state of Pennsylvania, reaching a vastly diverse demographic. The course design uses research-based instructional models to capture a wide range of student interests, skills, and abilities. We will present the program framework and a lesson from our first unit.