From the earliest days of kites and wooden air planes to more modern vessels like private jets and big passenger planes, people have always loved to make things fly. While it’s estimated that eight million people take flights every day, but in 2019 the fascination with flying has introduced drones into the picture. Drones are everywhere from delivery of goods to law enforcement, healthcare, TV news casting and many other activities.


Today, drone fly is a billion-dollar industry and in 2015 alone, nearly 400,000 drones were purchased as Christmas gifts. In addition, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) estimates that by 2020, there will be more than seven million drones in the United States and more than a million have already been registered as of 2018.


There’s no doubt drone flying makes for hours of fun, but it can also be educational. For many educators leading a drones for schools program, there are many benefits to using drones in a classroom setting. Drones—be they small unmanned flying vehicles controlled from a phone to bigger multirotor machines—provide teachers chances to make classes more interactive, chances to make lessons more topical and provide opportunities to keep students engaged.


A drones for schools program can do much more than that. These drones for schools programs can improve the motor and orientation skills of students and help give them a better understanding of the world they see around them. Drones also can spark students’ curiosity and deepen their imaginations, ultimately making them more excited about learning.


For schools considering starting drones for schools programs, there are many benefits to doing so in many school subjects including:

• Social Studies: This is one of the most obvious subjects where a drone can be useful in the classroom. By using drones, students can learn loads about their local geography as well as local history and cartography. By learning all these things through drone training software, students can create a multitude of multimedia projects such as presentations and videos.
• Math: There’s little doubt that math can be a hard subject for teachers to teach students, but drones can also help in this subject. The use of drones can give life to real world applications of math problems and complex equations. Some schools have used drones to create graphs, calculate distance and to learn concepts of trigonometry.
• STEM: Drones can be extremely useful for teaching many STEM topics, providing numerous live examples of the laws of physics as well as knowledge of chemistry and electronics. Not to be outdone, drones for schools programs can also be the perfect place to educate students about programming. Students can use this knowledge of programming to build robots to put that knowledge to practical use.
• Social skills: In addition to the knowledge students acquire from books, just as important is the real-world knowledge gained by interacting with other students. Skills such as communication, self-learning, empathy and working in teams are all important to learn and drones can actually help students learn them. For example, team projects involving drones can teach students about working together, about communication and about being flexible and receptive to the ideas of others.