Adopting drone technology in STEM education for rural communities

Abstract

The Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) subjects have always been the most challenging topics in education. One of the reasons is the dearth use of technology, especially for underprivileged students located in rural areas. Incorporating a drone in the STEM curriculum supports education that incorporates tangible experience such as observations, formation of concepts as well as creating imaginative and creative thinking. A drone@school initiative was introduced to foster the ICT technical and knowledge sharing among underprivileged students, hence exposing them to the recent technology in strengthening STEM education. The project has been carried out using an online platform by introducing the theoretical and application of drones in real-life practices. The responses from this project were very encouraging whereby utilizing drones as the medium, the level of understanding in STEM education had increased to 96.6%. Besides, the respondents' interest in STEM subjects significantly increased from 53.4% to 89.8%. The findings from the pre-and post-surveys revealed that the drone-based STEM learning approach had a positive impact on rural students' enthusiasm and excitement.