This past Fall semester I gave a 60 minute Forum presentation for STEM on drones, the different types of drones, and the physics of drone flight.  Over the weekend a WIRED article from a few months back popped up on my news feed with some actual physics, as in with math, that students can perform on a drone!

To summarize the experiment, either myself in advance or students in the classroom would take a slow motion video of the drone accelerating forward. Then, using an open source software tool called Tracker, analyze the video to capture the angle of movement and take actual measurements for the acceleration of the drone.  There’s some compensation that needs to be done based on the frame rate of the camera, however one just need to keep this in mind. Once you know the acceleration, and then measure the mass of the drone, you can use F=MA calculate the force of the drone’s movement.   (It’s a little more complicated than this, I’m breaking it down to it’s simplest elements to explain easily.)

This could be a fun experiment for physics students to perform here at BCC or anywhere really.  The article is pretty in depth, and it shows how students can use Tracker to make a parabola and includes all of the equations needed.

This could be a fun subset of a drone presentation for STEM Starter Academy or perhaps just something to build into my next forum presentation.  I’m always on the lookout for ways to make my presentations more educational or ways to bring experiments with technology into the classroom.