Children first looked at how drones are used in real life, such as to provide video images of earthquake zones and to travel inside unstable buildings without putting a rescuer's life at risk.
We then looked at the instruction blocks on the app and talked about how they are similar to those we have used for programming in Scratch. We used the Tynker app on the iPad which relays algorithms (sets of instructions) via bluetooth to the mini-drone. This device can be made to take off, move forwards, backwards, left, right, rotate to any angle and even do stunts like front-flips and back-flips.
Within the lesson, children worked collaboratively to write scripts for a series of challenges, acting them out first and then 'de-bugging' (correcting) any errors identified after trialing their programming. Children used their knowledge of angles from their recent maths work so that the drone created various shapes in the air with its flight path. In this lesson they successfully flew in squares, rectangles, equilateral triangles and a pentagon.