School Holiday Workshops

Technology Workshops in Partnership with World of Drones

The Sheldon LINQ Academy’s recent holiday workshop allowed students in Years 4 to 8 to work in teams to develop a unique drone idea, develop a drone prototype and edit their drone video pitch.

As part of the program introduction, students explored what role drones play in society, how drone technology can assist with problems in Australia such as extreme weather and the Great Barrier Reef. Students participated in a live Q and A with Dr Catherine Ball founder of World of Drones, Drone expert and Associate Professor, to seek answers to their design questions relating to how drones can solve some of the root causes and symptoms of the problems they identified.

Students navigated their way through a series of design-thinking workshops to prototype a drone idea that can fly, swim or crawl in the College’s LINQ (Learning and Innovation for a New Queensland) Precinct Makerspace before heading into the Film and TV editing suites to develop a short pitch video as part of their entry into the ‘Design-a-Drone’ Competition.

Year 6 student Sarah Gibb developed the ORSDA (Ocean Rubbish Scanning Drone Australia), a high-tech drone that scans for rubbish in the ocean and then alerts the nearest monitoring station. Sarah states “In this project, a whole network of drones will be included rather than just one. To recharge ORSDA, it calculates the distance to the nearest monitoring station and uses the solar energy banked up to get there. The ORSDA will use two modes of transport, flying and swimming. When the drone hovers, the arms are in a normal position but when swimming they are moved downwards to propel its movement.”