The podcast has been on a bit of a hiatus and I am excited to be back. Had a few changes happening, but let’s get back to the podcast!

Discover drones is your go to resource for learning about drones, drones and business, emerging drone technology and drones in STEM education. I am Dr. Heather Monthie, an FAA certificated, flight instructor, commercial pilot, remote pilot and dedicated stem educator. Join us as we discover more about drone safety, urban Air Mobility, business and education. Let’s get started.

FULL TRANSCRIPT:
Hi there stranger. Welcome back to The Discover drones podcast. It has been just about two years since we have done an episode on this podcast. But I am back. And I think that what I wanted to do today is just reintroduce what we’re doing here with the podcast, and what we can expect going forward. So when I first started the Discover drones podcast, I started it, it was started out as a quarantine project in the summer of 2020. And the I usually attend the Oshkosh air show in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, and it was canceled for the year. So I thought I’m gonna start a podcast about drones. And like many of us, we pick up projects, and they kind of get put out into the wayside when we get busy with other things. And I had a change in my career, I had a change in some other things. And so it kind of got put off to the wayside. And so I wanted to start up the podcast again. And I kind of thought I was gonna start up a separate podcast for educators who drone. And if you’re not familiar, or not a part of educators who drone it is a global community of parents and teachers and STEM education advocates and pilots who are interested in using drones in the classroom to teach children, young adults and even adults about different STEM education related topics. So things like coding, robotics, aerodynamics, weather, all that kind of fun stuff. So I had originally thought I was going to start a separate podcast for educators who join and I thought, no, let’s just put this all together with discovered drones. So what I’m going to do with this podcast, we’re still going to talk about drone related content, starting your own drone business, getting clients that kind of stuff, and figuring out what your niche is helping you pass the FAA part 107 exam, if you’re not in the US, providing you some resources to pass whatever exam is required in your country, all that kind of stuff. But there is a very, very, very distinct need for let’s talk a little bit more about how we can use drones in the classroom. And so when we talk about, you know, this concept of educators who drone these are going to be your people who are really interested in helping to teach the next generation the skills needed for the future of work, such as skills like problem solving, and creativity and computer science, robotics, engineering, aviation, cybersecurity, all the stuff that we’re seeing coming up in the future. And so what we’ll do is we’ll talk a little bit about so I’m what I’m going to do is I’m going to have separate like sort of sub episodes, where we’ll call it educators who drone. And this is where we’re going to talk about things about, like, how do we integrate drones into drones into the curriculum? How do we teach with drones, all that really, really good stuff. So let me re introduce myself, it’s been, you know, a little bit, if you just found this podcast, that’s great. You can go back there’s 10 episodes that we recorded in 2020 for the podcast. But the like I said, things have changed in my life. And I’m sure in yours as well. So but my background with aviation, computer science, education, has really all sort of come together with the, with drones. And I all growing up, I thought I was going to become an airline pilot, I was working on all of my pilot ratings, while I was going to school to get my degree in computer science. And for a few different reasons. My career as an airline pilot didn’t work out. So I started using my backup degree in cybersecurity and went into tech. And so this was, you know, the late 90s, early 2000s. And that was when Tech was just really booming. And I mean, obviously still is right now too. And so I went, I went that route, and I really enjoyed teaching, I became a certified certificated flight instructor. When I was working on my master’s degree, I got my teaching certification to teach in the K 12 system for computer science. And I just really, really, really enjoyed teaching. And what happened was several years ago, probably about 2016 or so I was starting to pay more and more attention to drones. I’ve always been involved in aviation, and I’ve always been involved in tech and specifically in ed tech as well. So I saw the price of drones starting to come down and I started to see them
approaching about the $100 mark and I thought
Wow, what if we could get a drone that’s right around the $100 mark, even even lower is even better. But what if we can find a drone that is at that $100 mark that comes with a software development kit or an SDK, or maybe it’s a drone that can be built something like that. So I thought that would be awesome, because then we can get it into classrooms, we can get it in the hands of our future leaders to help them learn some of these skills in a really fun and engaging way. This is not to say that all these students are going to go into drone manufacturing, or flying drones or things like that. But it is a really fun and engaging way to teach things like computer programming or coding. It’s a really fun and engaging way to teach robotics, you we can use drones as that sort of educational technology tool to really engage kids engage young adults and get them inspired to to try to figure out ways of solving problems. And being a little bit more creative in some of the ways that they’re thinking. So but the idea here is that the drones are a tool, the drones are a tool to help inspire and inspire creativity in students. So I started it started out as just a Facebook group where I invited people who are pilots, teachers, parents, STEM education advocates, anybody who was really interested in STEM education and started up this Facebook group. And we now have a website, we now have some digital downloads that are some are free, some of you can purchase for use in the in the classroom, or if you’re using this with your children, or if you’re using this with, you know, an after school program, that kind of thing. So it’s kind of just grown organically and it it’s been a it’s been a fun adventure, you’re talking with some of the different people that are using drones in education. So right now I am actually in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, the EAA, our experimental experimental aircraft Association has a the world’s largest general aviation airshow here in this tiny little town. And I’m here, right now, I’m going to be presenting next week on how to start up a drone program for your stem education classrooms. And so I’ll be presenting about that next week. Last year, I actually presented on the four different pillars of what I like to call in your like that you can use in sort of your drone curriculum, and that is build code fly, certify pretty easy to remember, build code, fly certify. So when you’re thinking about, I want to bring drones into the classroom, well, what is it that you want to teach? And those are sort of the core pillars of if you’re not really certain what you want to teach, you can kind of pick one of those and focus on that. So build is are you doing, you’re teaching engineering concepts, engineering design concepts, where you’re teaching students how to design and build a drone code is just that you use drones as a tool to teach computer science concepts and coding.
Build code fly, we’re learning how to fly drone doing obstacle course is the hands on, you know, hands on the on the controls, and we’re outside flying drones, or maybe inside in the gymnasium, flying drones, and then certify certify is going to be in the US. You know, there’s the trust certification, which we’ll talk more about that in future episodes. And then there is the FAA part 107 certification that we’ll talk about, again in future episodes. But then if you’re outside of the United States, there’s other certifications depending on which country you’re in. So we can talk about those kinds of things, too. So I presented about that last year. And I was like, so worried. I was like anything like you throw a party and you kind of like, is anybody going to show up is ever going to hate it is it going to be terrible, but like there was it was really good turnout, we had a really good turnout. And I was so excited to see so many people just really interested in learning how to figure out how to bring drones into the classroom and help us help help help the younger generation, you know, feel excited and engaged in some of these some of these topics. So I presented I submitted a presentation proposal again this year, and they accepted it. So I will be presenting again this year on how to just start up your drone education program. And, you know, we’ll be writing more that more information about that in the podcast as well. I’m hoping to be able to stream it, but there’s a lot of people there. And this is a small town. So sometimes the cell towers get a little bit overloaded. So but if you’re interested in learning more about my concepts of build code, fly certify, you can go to educators who drone.com and then click on courses. And I do have it available there that you can you can get the PowerPoint and you can get get an in depth presentation. It’s much more in depth of a presenter
Even though I gave at the air show last year, so you can go there, go to educators who drone.com, click on courses and look for build code, fly, certify. So, again, if you’re interested in drones and education, then this, this subset of the podcast is definitely going to be for you. Were we’ll talk about how drones are being used in curriculum, we’ll cover topics like, you know, how to teach with Jones skills that are needed in the future of work, all that great stuff. I’m also thinking that you know, because I also want to talk about a couple other areas of drones, we might have some different categories with a podcast, I don’t know. So that way, if you’re only interested in a specific area, it’s very easy for you to find the podcast episodes that will be relevant to you. So for example, if you’re interested in you know, starting a side hustle using drones, you start you’re interested in getting your part 107 certification, you know, there’ll be specific episodes related to that, and then you can just go find all those episodes, I have to figure out how to categorize all that just yet. But that’s kind of what I’m thinking here for the podcast. So thank you for if you made it this far in the episode I’m glad you’re here. And like I said, I’m glad to be back here after you know, almost a two year hiatus on the podcast, and we’ll see you guys in the next episode. Have a good one