Empowering Rural Learners:
Fostering STEM Careers with Free Drone Curriculum
What is Take Flight?
Take Flight is a free adaptable school curriculum program made up of 6 Missions or modules developed by Learning Scientists at CAST, the organization that founded Universal Design for Learning (UDL), funded by the National Science Foundation.
Through Take Flight, middle school teachers have access to the curriculum, tools and resources they need to integrate drones into their STEM curriculum to help their students develop STEM skills and increase their motivation to pursue STEM careers.
This team-based, experiential curriculum is intended for all middle school students, with particular design features to foster girls’ confidence and STEM skills, address stereotype threat, encourage engagement and persistence, and bridge the gender gap in STEM.
New Here? Join the Journey!
Take Flight is a four-year project currently in its third year of development. We're collaborating closely with a select group of teachers to co-design, refine, and test the curriculum. If you’ve come across this website and would like to explore the curriculum, we’d love to hear from you! Please send us an email and let us know if you're using it and share your experience with us.
How Does the Take Flight Curriculum Work?
The Take Flight curriculum is broken into 6 missions or modules, with 2-3 challenges or activities per mission. Each mission has 1 student portfolio and 1 landing assessment. The entire curriculum takes roughly 10 weeks (3 months) working at a pace of 45 minutes per week.
Missions
There are 6 missions or modules in Take Fight. The mission themes focus on communication, collaboration, careers, technical skills, and more. The Take Flight curriculum culminates in Mission 6 with students sharing what they learned.
Challenges
There are 2-3 challenges or activities per mission. The challenges are presented as downloadable Google slide decks. They provide the structure you need to introduce content and activities. You can present the decks, delete slides, print them out… whatever works best for your class!
Student Portfolios
Students will create a portfolio for each of the 6 missions. The portfolio is where students will be compiling and collecting information, data, evidence, images, and reflections. Students will use this information to create their final projects, in Mission 6.
Landing Assessments
At the end of each mission is a Landing Assessment. This Assessment consists of a 5-10 question multiple choice quiz, a few open-ended questions, and invitation to share artifacts. After completing each mission assessment students receive a downloadable certificate of completion.
How do Drones Connect to STEM Careers?
Our Drone Curriculum opens up a world of opportunities in a multitude of careers like aviation, geographic mapping, weather forecasting, shipping and delivery, and even wildlife monitoring. Because drone technology is a burgeoning field, students have the unique opportunity to shape their own STEM journeys, free from established stereotypes, and ready to meet the challenges of tomorrow's technological landscape.
Our curriculum encourages students to explore these opportunities by picking up skills needed to use Drones that are also key in all STEM careers, like coding, communication, and collaboration.
What Else Do I Need to Get Started?
If you are using the Take Flight curriculum, please complete a teacher pre and post survey. All other forms you need are included here too.
Check the list of the necessary equipment and where to find it and learn what you do or don't need to fly drones in your classroom.
What Does Take Flight Look Like in the Field?
A Project Developed by CAST and NSF
CAST.org is an educational research and development organization and the founder of the Universal Design for Learning framework (UDL). UDL is based on the insight that the way individuals learn can be as unique as their fingerprints. This approach advocates for flexible educational environments that can accommodate individual learning differences.
This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under grant 2146613. Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.
