Students and educators are often looking for innovative ways to integrate STEM plus creative arts—or STEAM—concepts into the curriculum. Recent advances in remote control and autonomous quadcopter unmanned aerial vehicles, UAVs, have brought the excitement of affordable drones within reach of many interdisciplinary classrooms. We have developed series of drone STEAM challenge festivals across the country, and accompanying curriculum, that provide students and collaborative student-teams of all ages the opportunity to create and share drone-based photographs and short films, race drones around obstacle courses, complete precision flying tasks, and create computer coding for autonomous flight, adding a new tool for teachers to more readily integrate across the STEAM disciplines.
