It's a bird, it's a plane, it's a drone? How Griswold HS students learn how to pilot them

Matt Grahn, Norwich Bulletin
Updated ·4 min read

The newest STEM class at Griswold High School is about to take flight.

This fall, Griswold High School will have a Drone Technology class. Students will learn how to fly indoor racing drones made by Rocket Drones, designed for educational use. Eventually, students will be skilled enough to fly professional drones, including ones that need an FAA certification to fly, or the supervision of someone with that certification, teacher and esports coach Jim Rand said.

The drones will be paid for with part of Griswold School District’s $20,000 from the state’s Dual Credit Expansion Grant, Andrew Meislitzer, who is the school's Academic Lead for Technology, Advanced Technology and Business, said.

Griswold High School teacher and esports coach Jim Rand flying a drone.
Griswold High School teacher and esports coach Jim Rand flying a drone.

Nexus Lab is hub of Griswold's technology classes

The Nexus Lab is the hub of Griswold High School’s technology classes. Equipped with high quality computers, it opened for the 2021-22 school year. The room is home to the high school’s eports program, and 11 technology classes, ranging from streaming and video editing to animation, coding, and even cybersecurity, Meislitzer said.

“We pretty much created a whole department from scratch,” he said.

Drone classes are a natural complement, Rand said.

Part of each class will teach flight concepts and the history of drone technology, while the other part of the class will feature flight. Students will pilot a computer-simulated drone until they are ready to fly a real one, Meislitzer said.

The class drones are a set of 10 small acrobatic drones. They also have a camera, so students can see from the drone’s perspective with a headset. The drones will be flown in a shop classroom with 25-foot ceilings, and obstacles will be set up for the students to avoid, Meislitzer said.

While the school has a professional quality drone already, the students will use the acrobatic drones to learn to stabilize the drones themselves. Those operational skills can be used with any drone, Rand said.

The drone class will eventually expand into lessons on drone use in aerial photography and land surveying, Meislitzer said.

“We’re really trying to keep a career and skills focus, so students can take away a skill from the class and apply it to the real world,” Meislitzer said.

The new class is expected to be popular. While one section can have up to 20 students, Rand isn’t sure how many sections there will be yet, he said.

Sophomore Carson Hunt first took Nexus classes to learn about making video games. However, he's interested in the new Drone Technology class, as flying a drone is a new experience for him.
Sophomore Carson Hunt first took Nexus classes to learn about making video games. However, he's interested in the new Drone Technology class, as flying a drone is a new experience for him.

Students eager to learn drone flying

Sophomore Carson Hunt first took video game classes in the Nexus Lab. Over time, he learned about other classes, and is now looking forward to something different with the drone class, he said.

“I’ve never flown a drone before; never flown a really expensive one anyways,” Hunt said. “That’ll be fun.”

While the video game classes also brought sophomore Neal Patel into the Nexus Lab, he is looking forward to the drone class, as it adds more variety to what the Nexus Lab offers. He recommends other Griswold students to take the school’s tech classes, he said.

“They should take it 100%,” Patel said. “If they want to take it, go for it.”

More options coming in the Nexus Lab

The next school year will also add the Gaming Concepts 3.0 class for juniors and seniors. While prior gaming classes focused on concepts around game design, this new class will focus on the work needed to make a fully functioning video game, Rand said.

On the esports side of things, Griswold High School played a season last fall. The school will continue to run the program for one season a year. Some of the current Griswold esports competitors may seek offers to join college teams in the next year or two, Rand said.

Griswold High School may also start a drone racing team, which would race other high school teams across the country through time trials, Meislitzer said.

Overall, Rand is pleased with how the Nexus Lab programs have expanded over the years.

“It’s exciting for a small school to be able to do all this, so we’re proud of were we’ve come from, and where we’re going,” Rand said.

This article originally appeared on The Bulletin: Drone, coding, cybersecurity STEM classes at Griswold High’s Nexus Lab