Ready to fly

New technology will be soaring into Jay County High School this school year.

JCHS is now home to Parrot Mambo and DJ Phantom 4 drones.

Principal Chad Dodd, along with JCHS technology coaches, were searching to find something new that would engage students in the curriculum while preparing them for careers after high school.

They decided drones were the answer.

Students in the school’s computer science, radio/TV and agriculture classes will be working with the new technology.

“The involvement from the kids will just explode when they get the technology in their hands,” Dodd said. “I’m just excited to see where this goes. It’s so brand new and I don’t see a lot of schools in the area doing this.”

With the Parrot Mambo drones, students in computer science classes will be given hands-on training using computer coding and programing to accomplish a variety of flight missions. One mission, for example, may be to code a drone with instructions to pick up a pencil from one point and transport it to another.

“It’s one thing to sit on a computer and write a program that will make the mouse do what you tell it to do on the computer,” Dodd said. “It’s another thing to write, program, have it sent to the drone and then be able to actually fly.”

In Lori Reece’s vocational radio/TV classes, students will be taught the basic uses of drone technology and operations (military, commercial and private), drone limitations, legalities including licensing and abuse, as well as examine the history and future of the technology.

The drones will also be used by students to cover and document community and school events, like football games and parades.

“This is still a developing technology with exciting potential new uses,” Reece said.

Even JCHS’s agriculture classes will get a taste of the new technology.

Agriculture teacher Cody Linville wrote a grant to The Portland Foundation for drones to be used in his classroom.

“My thought behind it is instead of walking the field, students are going to need to know how to use drones to cover more of a larger area,” Linville said. “The reality is future careers in agriculture will be more likely to use drone technology and we want to students to have those skills so they are ready.”

Linville plans to teach his students how to use the drones to track fields for crops as well as how to use the cameras for aerial photography.

The overall goal with introducing the drones to students is to get them exposed to new job opportunities within technology, Dodd said.

“If our kids can lead with those skills for these jobs that are just now being created – they may be better prepared for them than other kids,” he said. “We want to give them opportunities that others might not be getting.”

By 2021, the Federal Aviation Administration predicts that the number of commercially licensed drone pilots will increase from 20,000 in 2016 to as many 400,000.

Jordan Rising, the director of flight and technology at Flight Evolved, recently told CNBC "Many of the industrial applications of [drones] are being adopted by survey and engineering firms … Companies are hiring pilots who can likely expect to make between $50,000 and $70,000, depending on their expertise and the equipment they are operating."

Dodd said the possibilities of success that the drones can bring to students during and after high school is “endless and very exciting.”

While the drones are only being used at the high school level for now, Dodd said he could see the new development gaining momentum and “going down” into the elementary and middle schools of Jay County.