Drones seem to be everywhere these days, including high school classrooms. Some Herkimer students, in fact, are building drones for drone soccer.
"It is like Quidditch and rugby,” said STEM teacher and technology implementation specialist Richard Mathy. “You've got five-person teams. One is trying to fly through a hoop while the other four are trying to knock them out of the sky."
"We're currently working on the final part of the drone,” student Samuel Berowski said. “We are getting the last propeller on and this once we're done with this, we're going to be attaching it to the inside of these cages."
In the class, students also work on drone programming.
"It's not something that I would expect to be able to do in high school, but now that I know that I get to do it, it's actually really fun,” Berowski said.
"I absolutely love using the drones. Every Friday, we get to fly some mini drones to get some practice in,” student Liam McLean said. “Sometimes we go to the football field at the high school, and we get to fly these bigger drones, and that's just really cool."
Learning tech skills could come in handy for these students down the road.
"I think it's just interesting to find and offer students different pathways to make a living and contribute to society, such as flying a drone, either for first responders, for the wine industry, for farming, for whatever's out there in time,” Mathy said.