This is the PowerPoint presentation that can be used with students to introduce programming and how programming will work for the Tello drone.

This is a project-based learning exercise that uses the DJI Tello drone (https://www.ryzerobotics.com/tello) which is targeted for education, the Python programming language (http://pythonineducation.org/en/), and a free online simulator we developed. While we have used multiple different models of this project, the base requirement is for a single drone and computer that has access to the Internet. The materials are designed to be used with students that have no programming experience, but can be adapted for use within programming classes. The teacher or facilitator should have basic familiarity with Python and Jupyter Notebooks (https://jupyter.org/). We have made a web-based version of the simulator which enables students to run the simulation without having to install Python on their computers using myBinder (https://mybinder.org/) or you can install our simulator library locally. To deploy the code to a drone, the teacher or facilitator must install the simulator library on their computer as the code is sent to the drone via wifi.

One suggested model is to develop an in-class obstacle course for students to fly their drone through. For example, you could have designated launch and landing positions that are separated by a series of obstacles. Obstacles could include tunnels to fly through or corners to navigate around. This model can be a multi-day exercise depending on class time availability. 

Depending on the skill level of the class, you can either break the class up into teams or have students work individually. Each team or student then needs to observe and measure the actual course to determine what command inputs will let them successfully fly through the course. The simulator requires students to think through, develop, and test their entire flight plan via simple commands before deploying them to the real drone. When they run their simulation, it outputs some basic plots of the three dimensional paths the drone should take that can help them estimate how well their flight plan might work with the real drone. We suggest using teams as our experience has shown students enjoy working through how to measure and plan their flight as a group.

After simulating their flight, they can then deploy the same code to a real drone to see how their model performs in the real world. In order to control the flight of the actual drones, the facilitator can take the output from each team or student (via the save command discussed below) and deploy it from a single computer. Students can then observe how different approaches work in the real world with the actual drone.

There will always be differences between the simulation and the actual flight which will help students think about how to evaluate their model and improve it given data from the real flight. For example, if the drone goes too high, they can adjust their command script to account for this observation.

The simulator was developed for use in a Jupyter notebook so that the plots are displayed inline with the code print outputs. The simulator currently supports a subset of the full DJI command set including: takeoff, land, forward, back, left, right, up, down, flip, cw, and ccw.