By KEN PARK
The Enterprise
As if having the Dry Creek Fire camp next door wasn’t enough excitement for the kids attending summer school at Henkle Middle School, how about watching hand-made drones zip around the gym and the Columbia High School football field?
Insitu hosted its fifth annual Roboflight Academy and took over the Henkle Middle School gym and the south end of the football field to demonstrate some of the projects that it has been working on. The kids that participated in the RoboFlight Academy this year came from all over the Gorge as well as from Vancouver, Kelso, and Seattle.
On one side of the gym was a line of tables that acted as staging and repair areas for each team of kids and their mentors. The other side was lined with computers where students would demonstrate their programming skills. The center of the gym acted as a runway and landing pad for many of the experimental drones. Meanwhile, the football field was a designated space for the gliders and larger commercial-use drones.
“Roboflight began with just giving kids a chance to fly drones and learn about their programming.Now we basically give them those basics and let them DIY it,” said Dr. Dave Laning, principal engineer and Solutions Architect for Insitu “Most of the DIY drones here are made up of pieces from flying toy bodies or innards things like Airhogs airplanes or foam drones that look like Iron-Man, Legos, etc.”
Roboflight Academy is offered for kids in grades 8 to 12. Applications for the program go out to the schools in April and can also be found online.
However, the process is getting more competitive each year, according to Tamara Kaufman, Insitu ‘s Community Coordinator. “We are also trying to get more girls involved in it as well. The girls that we have participating in it this year are incredible and excited to be here.”
How the Roboflight Academy works is the kids are split up into teams and given mentors; usually at least one of them has at least two years of experience in the Roboflight Academy acting as a peer mentor, as well as an instructor from Insitu. Participants attend lectures and classes that teach them basics of programming and flight. Then, they are given free range to start designing and building either drones or gliders. They then get to prove that their flight designs work and that they can actually use the programing skills they have learned.
Tyr Anderson was the peer mentor for the group of students participating in Roboflight from White Salmon. “I enjoy being around to help out the other guys when they needed it. It’s a really fun and interesting experience,” he said.
The group from White Salmon, Cody Colloton, Greg Haner, Jacob Lockman, and Canyon Willey, mainly focused on building gliders and learning about lift, flight, and distance without a motor. Haner said, “I wanted to switch to gliders as opposed to drones for more of a building challenge,” to which teammate Willey chimed in jokingly “lots of repair in between flights.” For teammate Jacob Lockman, it was all about the educational experience. “I just wanted to make an airplane and learn about flight and lift and this program really provided a great experience for me to learn that and get build on,” he said
There appears to be lots of learning going on across the White Salmon community this summer and a bright future to look forward to from these students.
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