Jordan School District students took first and second place at the Technology Student Association State Drone Competition in March, but the pathway to their success was scattered with melted propellers, spliced batteries, burned-out servos and a lot of crashes.

“Every single part on every single drone didn’t work at some point,” Herriman High School senior Drew Hammon said. “If it works the first time, it’s going to break eventually. So, it’s just like problem solving being able to figure out super technical issues.”

West Jordan High School junior Audrey Beckstrand and JATC student Isaac Hancock, whose team took second place at the competition, went through five redesigns of their drone and burned out every servo they had before their drone was ready for competition.

“There’s like hundreds of different variants of every single part that have been at least thought of in detail,” Beckstrand said. “I don’t remember the exact numbers—I think it was like 34 printed parts, every single one redesigned at least twice.”

Learning through trial and error is a key lesson in Amber Saffen’s Unmanned Aerial Systems Design class at Jordan Academy of Technology and Careers, in which the students from Jordan District learn to design, build and program a drone.

“Because it is an engineering class, and engineering and failure goes hand in hand, we like to see the failure because then we learn from it, and we get to get the data from it and figure out why it does not work,” Saffen said.

Saffen has been teaching drone skills for three years. The first year her students participated in a competition, only one of their drones got off the ground. She and her students have learned a lot since then.

“This year was the first year I had every single group was able to get off the ground—and now, they might have only been off the ground for half a second as their drone flipped over—but they got off the ground,” Saffen said.

Four of the seven teams at the state competition were from JATC. Hammon and teammate Tanner Gunnell took first place and will be competing at nationals in Nashville, Tennessee this summer. Saffen was thrilled with their performance.

“The amount of things that they have to get and calculate and solder correctly and mount correctly and design correctly to even get off the ground is monumental, so let alone then complete the TSA course, that anytime they do, I’m just so proud because it’s not an easy thing,” Saffen said.

The competition challenged students to design a drone that could complete specific tasks.

“We had to fly through an obstacle course and pick up a toy dinosaur and then fly it back and drop it in the zone, and then we also had to fly through the obstacle course and pick up a 3D printed cage with the dinosaur in it and fly it back,” Gunnell, a Riverton High School senior, said. “And we also had to use a camera that transmitted video on our drone to identify things throughout the run.”

Hammon said the drones they built are not like those that can be purchased at the store.

“We had to make a drone that could be really, really good at those fine movements in a small, enclosed space, which is, like, way harder,” Hammon said. ”But the real engineering came in with these claws that we had to completely design from the ground up, attach it to a frame and work with the servos to fit all in here, and then to pick up these very irregularly
sized things.” λ