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SHARPSVILLE — As several drones ascended, descended, darted back and forth and sometimes bumped into chairs, the cafeteria filled with the buzzing of rotors and the voices of students — often offering advice to those holding the drones’ controls.

Propelled by four rotors, each drone’s battery allowed for only a few minutes of flight before needing to be recharged. That didn’t stop many of the students from attempting a few maneuvers before handing the controls to someone else.

“It’s really not too complicated. I think it only took us a few minutes to learn how to use,” eighth-grader Cameron Hoovler said.

The class Tuesday afternoon in Sharpsville Area Middle School’s cafeteria was a familiar experience for some students with prior experience flying drones, including fellow eighth-grader Ivan Metro.

“It is nice to have a break from the normal math work once in a while and practice with the drones,” Ivan said.

Watching over the class was teacher Peyton Schell, who said he often allowed his students to work with the drones on Fridays, either using the school’s gym or cafeteria for extra space.

Sometimes stepping out of a drone’s way or guiding the students’ drones with his hands, Schell said the drones aren’t just a reward for the students.

Rather, the drones help reinforce the skill-building and STEAM — for science, technology, engineering, art and math — elements of his math enrichment class.

“It’s something that helps the students become problem-solvers,” Schell said.

The drones flying through the cafeteria are just one element of the Sharpsville Area Middle School’s STEM/STEAM curriculum, which Principal Heidi Marshall said has built into a primary focus for the school over the past several years.

“There are several sources that we have utilized to meet the needs of our school community, as we aim to provide foundational skill-building, problem solving opportunities and fun,” Marshall said.

One sources is Woz ED, a curriculum provider developed by Steve Wozniak, creator of the Apple computer.

Marshall said Woz ED has 10 “pathways” that facilitate students’ preparation for careers in science and technology, including drones, AR/VR, animation, coding, the engineering design process and robotics.

The students even gave Sharpsville Area School Board a hands-on demonstration at its January work session, where a pair of students demonstrated a Sphero robot.

The board later voted to make another purchase from Woz ED during their January meeting, which Marshall said would provide another drone kit.

“The ease of use of the Woz ED kits makes them a great fit for staff, and we’re very excited to continue to facilitate innovation and exploration among our students,” Marshall said.

In teacher Abby Ainsley’s Tech Exploratory class, students worked on different yet similarly tech-themed projects through the Woz Ed curriculum.

Some students used tablets to access AR/VR, or augmented reality/virtual reality, programs, allowing the students to see landscapes with different animals moving past.

By taking their tablets and moving around the room, the AR/VR program allowed the students to act as if they were moving around a desert or forested area.

“A student could see an animal like a tiger, and the program will give them information on tigers,” Ainsley said.

Aside from the AV/VR program, some students were able to use small robots, called Sphero, which could be directed by the students’ instructions.

One group of students included eighth-graders Dominique Brown and Tommy David, who said the robot’s movements could be programmed three ways — block coding, writing the code and tracing the robot’s path on a tablet.

With block coding, the students just choose a set of directions that are already encoded in easy-to-select blocks, compared to writing out the entire code, complete with letters, numbers and symbols, Dominique said.

The process requires precision.

“If you screw up one thing when you’re typing the code, then the whole thing doesn’t work,” Dominique said.

One of the students’ favorite projects working with the Woz ED curriculum, particularly the AR/VR program, involved designing their own house for a social studies assignment.

“I had to design a house like they have in China, and then it you could go inside it and look around,” Tommy said.

Ainsley said that while the technology may seem advanced, it can be readily incorporated into the class curriculum, in myriad ways such as having students recreate a historical setting from their social studies classes with the AR/VR program.

Even coding can help reinforce the lessons of English and language arts, since the importance of sentence structure and wording is comparable to the preciseness of writing computer codes, Ainsley said.

The technology itself also helps the students learn the importance of perseverance through trial and error, compared to a one-and-done test score, Ainsley said.

“It teaches the kids to fail, but not to quit,” she said.

“If a student programs something and it doesn’t work the first time, they learn to go, ‘Okay, I didn’t get it yet, but I’m going to keep trying and I’m going to make changes until I get it.’”

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