Sean Tibor: Hello, and welcome to teaching Python. This is episode 115, and today we're going to be talking about a program called drone blocks with Dennis Baldwin, its creator. My name is Sean Tyber. I'm a coder that teaches, and my. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Name is Kelly Schuster, and I'm a teacher that codes. I was sleeping. Sorry, I'm still in daydream mode. I've got two days left. Sean Tibor: Sean, what a great summer you've been having. Right, well, excited to welcome Dennis Baldwin to the show today. We're excited to talk with you. Dennis Baldwin: Thank you. Super excited to be here. Sean Tibor: Well, we've got a lot of good stuff to get into about drones and how to program with them and how to really use that as an exciting way to teach. Kelly, anything in particular that you'd like to share before we get to the winds of the week? Kelly Schuster-Paredes: No, I'm going to be quiet and maybe think of something later. Sean Tibor: At the end, I thought there was something that you're just itching to get out, so all right, we'll go on to the the wins of week. All right, Dennis, you're up first. Something great that's happened inside or outside of the classroom. Dennis Baldwin: Maybe I'll share two, if that's okay. A personal one and then a technical personal. We just dropped my oldest off for her second year of college at university of Oklahoma, so win, in a sense for her, a loss for us at the house. Right. And then my younger daughter just got her first job. She's 16. So we're excited to have our daughters go out into the world and hopefully do great things. The technical win of the week, it's still a bit of a struggle, but we've been doing a lot of work with, dare I say it, chat GPT. I was very reluctant to even mess around with it and experiment with it because people get freaked out about AI. But from my experience, we got a long ways to go. But what we were doing was working with making drone blocks somewhat compatible, like the block coding. So essentially, you would interface with a GPT prompt, tell it, hey, here are my blocks. I want to create a mission, like, teach me the equation of a polygon in block coding. And so it would spit out a response after we trained it a little bit, and then all of a sudden, you'd see these blocks on a canvas. So I'll leave it with people get scared that, hey, maybe in the technical space that chat GPT or AI is going to replace jobs. But I think from a fundamental standpoint, it's a good foundation. You can have it do some low level work, right. The work that you might struggle through a little bit, and you get to maybe add your secret sauce or deliver value on top of that. So Chap GPT has been interesting, and we hope to roll that out to our program in the near future. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: That's super cool. And I think you probably just had a couple of code block instructors go, what? Chat GPT can code blocks, too, because I think that was, like, their work around. Oh, we'll use Edgy blocks and we'll force them to do block coding instead of it's kind of like the handwritten essay. So that's pretty cool. From the past six episodes, I've just been drinking the Kool Aid of AI, trying to read everything and isolate the sensationalism. But it is an interesting platform, and it does open a lot of doors to creativity and that idea of what a kid can create when they're not limited by what they don't know, it's kind of like that JIT that just in time learning. So that's pretty exciting. Exciting win. Dennis Baldwin: Thank you. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Not as exciting as mine, but Sean will be proud of me. Sean Tibor: All right, go ahead, Kelly. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: So I'm in preparation for next week is our official, official start where I have to go into school. I did delete the three apps that were sucking out the time of my coding. Sean's like yeah, just quit. And so I deleted them off my phone so I'm no longer sitting there playing these mindless games that I do during the summer to just detox and get away. And so that was officially done today because I picked my phone up and I needed to do some things, and I started playing. I'm like, oh, it's gone. I'm deleting. Moving on. New school year, ready to go. So that was a huge win. Just say no. Sean Tibor: Yeah, it's a proactive win, right? You're ahead of schedule. By saying, I'm going to remove these things out of my life that are blocking my productivity or sucking away time. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: I have no idea what I'm going to do this weekend. I'll actually have to talk to my family, I guess. Sean Tibor: First time for everything, I guess. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Just kidding. Sean Tibor: All right, so on my side, the win this week is that I'm away from home. I'm traveling this week back to the corporate mothership. As many of you know, I have several summer interns that are working with us in my day job at Mondelez, and they are presenting their final projects. So they're presenting to our entire organization all the work that they're doing, and it's really gratifying to see these final presentations. It's like vicariously through them, I get to feel that win. And I know that I remember it's been 20 years since I did my intern presentation, what it felt like to be done with that, to have that sense of accomplishment and feeling that you built something and did something really cool and interesting and that other people appreciated that. And so it was really wonderful to see them present and to be able to share all of their wins with the organization and get that really warm feeling of recognition and support and appreciation. And I have to say, it's one of the things I love about my new job is just the community support within our technical function is really outstanding. And so it's been really great to ensure that those interns could feel that support and encouragement in the process. So it was a big win. We just walked out of the first half of that, and tomorrow we get to go back for another session with the remaining interns. So it's pretty exciting and fun to be able to see this from the front row. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: And the big win is you don't have to do grading after that. Sean Tibor: Oh, no, there's still grading. It's just not letter grades. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: That's the worst part of presentations. I think the learning is amazing. Watching people grow and giving feedback and positive and critical is great, but when you have to open up the grade book and put in the grades, it's not so much fun. Sean Tibor: It's funny how being a teacher has changed me. Before I was a teacher, when I would have to do something like this and give feedback and critically assess how someone did in a way that helped them grow or helped us understand their capabilities and potentials. I used to kind of dread that because I didn't know how to do it or I felt uncomfortable or was awkward. And now that I've been a teacher and I've done it literally thousands of times, it is so much more easier for me to do it. It's easier for me to get into that space where I can be thoughtful and fair and give good feedback. And so I'm really glad that I've been able to incorporate that experience into my professional corporate life as, oh, that's so sweet. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Always a sorry. Sorry. We have our moments, Dennis. Dennis Baldwin: I love it. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: And we are super excited to have you. When I saw what you do, I quickly said, sean, our next guest is for you. So I'll segue there to Sean. Sean Tibor: Yeah. So, Dennis, welcome to the show. Welcome to our conversation. We're excited to discuss all this with you. I think you have done a lot of the things that I've only dreamed about doing. We talked about those ideas that you have that sometimes are limited by the things you don't know how to do. You've gone off and done it, and so reading your bio is like, wow, that is so amazing that you've done that, that you've worked with those things. So let's start kind of at the beginning, I guess. You're the creator of Drone Blocks Now, which is a block based coding approach to programming drones with a lot more I mean, that's a very simplified version of it, but let's talk a little bit about your kind of lifelong interest in RC, cars, planes, and how that's turned into drones and coding and so much more. Dennis Baldwin: Sure. Well, thank you for tapping into a bit of the background, because I think that's important and not a question I get asked very often, but yeah, so early years, middle school probably got into RC cars and started messing around with planes. But then I had to do that thing called study and focus on what I wanted to be when I grew up. And so that led to studying engineering. In college, I was an electrical engineer. I say was because I do very little electrical stuff anymore. It's all more software related. But the physical aspects of building drones, soldering wiring still is probably one of the more important things to me personally, right? It's just a good way to get away from the computer, get hands on. And so that love of, I guess, RC led to discovering kind of some of these open source projects, rdupilot, PX four. And then in 2015, I guess, DJI released an SDK. And having been a software guy since I got out of college, I really saw the power of combining something that I loved, which is the RC remote control side of things, with my professional career of programming. And about, I guess, 2015, 2016, I was volunteering at a program here. A good friend of ours, she ran it at our elementary school. It's called tech team. I'm outside of Austin in Dripping Springs. And so we started 3D printing drone frames, assembling them, soldering the ESCs, hooking up the motors, flying them. And of course, kids were like, oh, this is cool, but we want to put a camera on it, we want to take photos, we want to do all of this stuff. And that's when DJI the Phantom was, as you guys know, the early day drone. And then they started releasing smarter hardware with the ability to be programmable through the SDK. And so we put together this proof of concept that used a phantom. And now I look back and kind of cringe if you've seen phantoms are good size, but we also had an Inspire one, which is a lot larger, airframe, and we were using block coding to fly those around outdoors in a field, take photos. And really, I'm not an educator by trade. I just love open source. I love community and sharing information. So that led to saying, okay, well, maybe there's the possibility of developing this app, making it more widely available. And so that's sort of how it all began. It's just out of the classroom, creating the app, making it available, supporting people in the open source community and really trying to support as much hardware as we possibly can. Sean Tibor: Nice. I think it's such a great progression as well, because you were there at every step along the way as we made that transition from RC, where it was very manually controlled with a lot of great electronic support over the years into what became possible with drones and even taking it to the next level. So I think what is interesting to me, or where I've been fascinated in drones, is that progression from, okay, so we have software assisted drone flying, right? Like the ability for a drone to hover is not because I'm an amazing pilot. It's because the software is really good, right? Dennis Baldwin: Yes. Sean Tibor: But where we really get interested and where we get fascinating results is when we start applying code and thinking about algorithms and how we can program the drones to respond to different stimuli or to follow up a plan or a pattern. What I'm curious about is how that idea of teaching the plans or teaching the responsiveness, treating it more like a robot than an RC aircraft was useful or where it changed things. When it came to the students in the elementary school, was that something that they got excited about or they got into? How did that change for them in the learning process? Dennis Baldwin: Yeah, that's a great question. So as part of that program, Marissa Vickery, who's a good friend and helped get drone blocks off the ground, she was running this tech team. And obviously, as you guys know, sometimes you need to reach outside of maybe the classroom and get volunteers, get support. And I think around that time, you guys, I'm sure, are familiar with our code was getting up and running and all of that. I love it. But it's in a browser, right? You're delivering content in a browser. You're moving stuff around on the screen. And so the physical aspect of being able to take code and that's why we introduced a simulator a few years ago, is to see your code on a screen, how it behaves, and then deploy that to real hardware. So that's probably a long winded way of answering your question, Sean. It was like, I don't know if instant gratification know, what we do is pretty instant, but just seeing, know, digital kind of ideas go to digital and then actually being deployed to the physical world with a real drone is amazing. I would love to. Personally, I spend a lot of time you mentioned RC and the airplanes, and now we have drones that hover, but there's this world in between of the vertical takeoff and landing aircraft. And so that to me, personally gets really exciting. If we could in the future, interface with not only drones that hover and fly around, but actually unmanned winged flight would be really cool. And so I think drones inherently are kind of a cool subject. Drone Racing League and FPV and all of that. And what I like to say is that I kind of make maybe a comparison a bit to NASCAR or F one, which are amazing things, but you have these elite drivers racing around a course, but you don't really see what goes behind the scenes, right? The engineering, the mechanical aspects, the software aspects. So really just trying to reinforce not only software, but that software is going to run on a physical device that's going to do something in the real world is very powerful. And we see it when the light bulb goes off with students. Sean Tibor: Yeah. Thinking about that. One of the things that occurs to me as you're describing this is some work that we did with what were those called, Kelly? The little Wally like drones or robots, the ones that we used on the table, like Vector and Cosmo. Cosmo, yeah. So we could program these little robots that were relatively inexpensive, probably about the same size as a little TELO drone like you can use with drone blocks. But there's something about seeing the code happening in real space that appealed to students, like, that they could really get it and understand it in a fundamental way that was harder to do on a screen or on the web. It's that almost like we live in a three dimensional space, right? We live in this world. And to be able to write code that makes something happen in that space where we live was much easier for them to just quickly understand and process. When they could see it happening, they could touch it, they could stop it, they could see that movement and motion. And it sounds like that's a lot of what you were experiencing with drones and drone blocks was to be able to take those conceptual ideas, the theory, and turn it into real space, movement, action, sound, stuff that they could see and understand. Really natively. Dennis Baldwin: Absolutely. As a side note, the number one thing or most exciting thing for kids is when they drag, like, the flip block out onto the canvas, right. You see the drone flip on the screen, the simulator. And then I was the same way. I was like, there's no way this is going to work. And Kelly and a lot of other drones just do an amazing job of flipping and holding position. There's a lot going on there to keep that drone in the air one, but for it to maintain position. Sean Tibor: Yeah, I don't think people believe us. You can actually make the drone do a somersault in midair, like 1 second hovering, and the next second it completely flips around and comes right back to hovering. And it's the most magical thing you can imagine. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: I was just thinking of that while you were talking, both of you, because you were saying in a simulator well, just this past year, some of my 8th grade boys, it's fun. They get the drones out. I put them out and I let them do sometimes the remote control. And they have either their phone and we have different types of drones. We have the Tellos, and we have also these really tiny these tiny ones, I don't remember the name of them, sorry. I'll look it up later on the show notes. But they play around with them and they're controlling them. And I said, that's great, you've been controlling them for about two weeks. Try to do what you just did in code. And we had no simulator amount of know. They didn't realize the height of the ceiling. And the flip was great when they finally got that code in and the hovering. And it reminds me of the time when Sean first introduced Tellos. I walked into the classroom, and I almost got taken out by one of the students, and he caught the kid with a camera at the exact time. And it's like this photo that we love having, and he's like, only takes me out. So in the simulator, is this part it's part of the drone blocks as well. Is that part of the product? Dennis Baldwin: That's correct. We introduced it, unfortunately, with COVID and everything, just to have a way to sort of carry forward some of the work that we were doing behind the scenes with the hardware. We knew that, yes. Around that time. We have the simulation. It comes with the whole package, but I'll just go off on a bit of a tangent. One thing that I've seen, I used to do a lot of mobile software development where you have a simulator or an Emulator iOS or Android, and you get to sort of see on the screen what happens before you deploy your code to real hardware. Right. And so I would argue that it's probably just as important or not, or even more important to be able to see your code. So you're not running a simulation, so you don't fly into a wall, or maybe you're telling it to land by descending altitude, but perhaps you have a block that's telling it to go up. Right. So being able to see that simulated before you deploy to real hardware is something that we stress the importance of, and it's what we also see in industry. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: You're not going to put the pilot out there flying the plane before they've. Dennis Baldwin: That'S a good point. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: I love that idea. They're not that costly of bots, but if you're on a public school budget, to break a drone is cringeworthy. Right. So that kind of helps. It's not fun to just slam them up against the ceiling and pray that it didn't break. They are pretty durable, not going to lie, but not too durable. Sean Tibor: Yeah. The other thing that I think is important for the learning process and I've see this professionally with writing code as well. Is that the loop or the time between when I make a change or when I write the code. And when I can see the effects of that and then also when I can make a change to improve upon it or to correct some behavior. The shorter I can make that loop, the faster my learning occurs. Right. So if you think about it, in the simulator, I can run at double speed, right. So I can watch my program execute, and then if there's an issue, I can fix it quickly and then run it again. I don't have to wait for a drone to charge. I don't have to go find it from across the room or whatever, I can reset and get going again. And I think we saw that a lot with some of the work that we were doing with autonomous driving cars, with robotic students, where they could simulate, check their results and then make adjustments. It's that kind of engineering process loop that's really important, and simulation makes that happen much faster. Dennis Baldwin: That's great to hear. I'm impressed that that's happening at a younger age level. It took me a while to really understand the importance of testing code and simulating, because a lot of times you're like, oh, I want to see this work, and I want to see it now. Right? And Sean, to your point, if you can kind of speed up that loop to where you can simulate tests that get you out to the field, know, in the air faster, even better. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: So I want to ask and this is a little sidebar on my nerdiness side, and actually, Sean loves sensors, too, but talk about this data sensor. I love this idea, the curriculum behind using the drones with those science sensors and everything. Yeah, the data boss. Dennis Baldwin: They're an interesting hardware partner of ours, and they run this little, just really cheap board called an ESP 32. But they've combined, like, 1516 different sensors in a little cube, and yeah, Kelly, just to be able so the sensors are interesting, and I always struggle as a software guy, like, ideas. How do you use them? Right? So, obviously, sitting on a table, I had this idea the other day, like, hooking up to my washing machine, right? Because it has Wi Fi. It has, like, just to send me an email or a notification when the wash is done. We have a real problem in our house where especially my daughters will leave their wash in once it's done. And I go to open it, and I'm like, Dang, it's my turn. Right? So all that to say, this device, all of a sudden, there's this, I guess, buzzword now IoT, right, internet of things. You now have connectivity. You can get sensor data, put this thing on a TELO, do stuff in real time. And so we have this whole machine learning course that we authored around data bot just to give people ideas of what's possible. But, yeah, that is a really fun device, and we're looking at more interesting ways of incorporating it into the curriculum. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Very cool. We can go out, just fly outside and check the different areas where there's grass or where there's concrete and see the heat index. It's just bringing that data science into play and more like a real world connection. I was thinking the other day, I saw FPL with their drones out, and I just sat there, and my kids were like, what are you doing? And I said, I'm watching the drones. And they're like, what? Yeah, so what a great tie in. I didn't have a question. I just thought and I was like, wow, that's great. Sensors. Dennis Baldwin: Well, I'll add that at some point. The drone, it's obviously a flying computer, but it's a platform. Right. Why did DJI become so successful? Because they have amazing hardware. But the cameras, the cameras are higher quality. You can take photos, you can create maps, you can do video. And so the drone is secondary. It's all about the data that you can acquire. So putting a data bot or some sort of sensing capability to hardware and then showing that, okay, well, in industry, less of the time might be spent flying the drone or programming the drone autonomously to fly and map an area. But it's more like what do you do with the data on the ground? Like post processing, right. Analyzing that data, seeing what interesting things you can learn from it. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Well, it's the tool. Right. So I think that's one of the things that Sean and I like about the computer science curriculum and everything. It's the tool and what you're going to do with it. The segue from what you're going to do from learning about drones. Kids go in, start playing great, but if they can automate this code in order to do a specific job that they might want to use in the future, maybe they are going to be a videographer, is that correct? Where they fly over a sports and maybe they have a certain length of field. So all these possible curriculum ties that teachers can bring into the classroom to connect, give a student a scenario. Okay, you're going to be working for FPL. You're going to be filming messy into Miami, program your code so that you have to do this link so that the tool provides the curriculum support for your dreams. So it's a fun aspect to have in the computer science classroom. Sean Tibor: I think, one of the questions I had, I think drones force us to think differently, right? Like you have to think in three dimensional space, the fourth dimension of time. Where am I going? Where does this happen? It's different than even driving around a robot on a table like we were doing with the Cosmo, because there I'm thinking about two dimensional space and where I'm going to move to. Drones require us to think differently in order for them to work, but they also empower us to think differently. A helicopter pilot thinks the same way that a drone pilot does, right. Or an F 35 pilot thinks the same way as like a VTAL drone pilot would think. But the difference is I don't have to go to school and be in the military with millions of dollars of training under my belt to fly a VTOL fighter jet. Right. I have a V tall drone I can use or I can think differently. And the barrier to entry, the cost of entry and even the age of entry is different with these drones. And with the capabilities here. But I also like the fact that that's combined with the computational thinking, so it's not just about thinking in space and time. It's also thinking about breaking down problems into smaller parts and how to solve those and how to integrate the solution back together. In your experience with drone blocks and the simulator, the real world, the work you've done in schools, is there a way or a method that helps unpack that for students, helps them realize or unlock that? That's the way we need to think when we use drones. Is it something that happens gradually or is it something that happens bang right at the beginning? Dennis Baldwin: I'm glad you threw that gradually thing in there, Sean. I feel like for me, that's certainly how it happened, right? And I was not exposed to drones until about, I guess 15 years ago or whatever. I don't know if you guys remember the Parrot AR drone. It came out in Brookstone and it was like, wow, what is this thing? Right? And it had all these capabilities, a camera. But yeah. So for me, my, I guess, learning style that I try to convey through some of our curriculum and I'm not the only person writing curriculum is expose users to as much as possible, right? I was thinking, okay, I'm going to get on this podcast with Sean and Kelly and they're going to quiz me on my Python knowledge, right? And I realized, you know, I touched Python a lot in the early days, but then I started to know, as I mentioned, Chat GPT, it's more like having a process of understanding how you program, right? You learn simple the fundamentals variables, strings, booleans, all this stuff about programming that can be incorporated or taken to any language, right. As Kelly said, it becomes a and so, you know, Sean, I think that exposing them to languages, exposing them to general topics like machine learning with DataBot, will then all of a know, I think, prep students to maybe take an interest in something and then go into the real world and say, hey, maybe I want to pursue a career in data science. Because I did something with a little sensor device called DataBot. Or I was using block coding to have this drone kind of repeat this mission. Maybe I'll take an interest in working at an aviation company doing QA, right? To be able to repeat that's. One thing that we see a lot of people do is create repeatable code. I'll share a story with DJI. They reached out to us a few years ago and their QA team was working on a new drone and they were using drone blocks because they wanted to see the performance of their drone outdoor, right? So to see it go to each location, make sure that the GPS accuracy and everything was there. But I guess a long winded way of answering your question, Sean, that I. Think exposing them to as many languages as possible, exposing them to hardware and really kind of opening the door to a different way of thinking, to where they can kind of maybe become more of a generalist and then kind of hone in on more of a specialized field of study. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: And I think you hit that for me in the middle school and even venturing into high school. That generalist idea of introducing them to languages, introducing them to the skills that are transferable, is like yours being a teacher's primary goal. And I was sitting there thinking, for any teacher that's probably going, well, how am I going to get drones or how am I going to get this approved? This is critical thinking. This is algorithmic thinking. This is spatial awareness. You can't even imagine the 6th graders that grab this thing and can't really fathom the room that's around them and their drone and how they're drawing or flying. You want to add any other skills that you guys have talked about through your curriculum? Dennis Baldwin: Yeah, so I think where I spend, oh, gosh, I jump around from different languages. JavaScript, now we have Node, which is server side. There's Node Red, which is almost like a flow based programming. You could think it's maybe we'll call it visual. Right. It's very similar to Blockly, where you can embed logic into each of the blocks. So Python JavaScript, Node Red, we just released probably earlier this year, a JavaScript library for the Go one. It's this quadruped robot, and it really just allows people to what I try to reinforce is there's the languages. And I think languages are important. I don't think that anybody should say, hey, this is the one language. But it's then understanding how you get access to that code. There's a lot of open source code out there. You fork it, you set up your environment, boom, you're up and running. So that's more of the technical side of things. Right. And then we want to really kind of evolve towards we're working on this new hardware, it's PX four based, where you're learning a little bit more what goes on beneath the hood. Because I feel like we claim we're in the Stem field, right. But a lot of what we focus on is computer science, and I think there's a part of that we're missing. It's Assembling. And like I talked about earlier, like Soldering. Soldering might be going a little bit know, I'd love to have a conversation with you guys in the future. Like, is Soldering in the classroom crazy? Kelly Schuster-Paredes: No. We love soldering. That was one of the skills that Sean brought in. Dennis Baldwin: And it is oh, that's amazing to hear. I want to send you guys a kit then. It's very early stage, but the point is assembling configuring learning how things work, right? And then you're in the world of, okay, now I can program it, but I also understand some of the fundamentals. So I know that was long winded, but aside from the software aspects, is really kind of getting under the hood and teaching some of the physical aspects of the hardware. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Well, that just really got me excited because I was going to ask you about the Go one, but we can go back to that later. The soldering of the drones, for me, that's like the full picture. If you can sort of imagine the kids playing with the Legos or the Spike Prime, even to this day, I put a box of Legos with a robot, and the kids are going to spend more time creating what's going to go on that bot and the gadgets that's going to take out the next bot or the sensors. And they'll spend 85% of the time building the bot and 15% of the time coding sometimes. And you have to remind them it's about the movement. But there's something that happens when kids can get their hands on that hardware. Even the soldering of a little ladybug that lights up a couple of lights and it has some resistors that's always said from the kids that's my best class, that's my favorite class is that soldering class. So you hit the nail right on the top because it's a big component for kids to say, I made this and now I'm coding it. So kudos to you on that. I didn't know about that. John, you want to add? Sean Tibor: No, I was just going to say soldering is a huge win, right? And it was a surprising I mean, I thought it would be good, but it ended up being, to Kelly's point, a lot of kids favorite activities and a lot of them got into this Zen state of just, I'm soldering, I'm focused, I'm tuning out the rest of the world, and I'm doing this. And I think for a lot of students, that also built a sense of confidence that if they can do something like that, that's intimidating at first. Holding a 700 degree soldering iron and melting metal together and making these joints, they just got this sense of satisfaction out of it that if I can do that, there's other things that I can do too. I don't have to be scared by these things. And I love the idea of going into drones as a next step because now it's something that they can take to the next level and say, I made this thing and now it's flying. Right? That's a huge win and just a big confidence booster for our students to be able to have that sense of accomplishment and the sense of a real accomplishment, not just something that was, oh, I followed some instructions and it was a kid, it was real challenging work, and they did it well. Dennis Baldwin: I have to say. Thank you guys for a bit of the enlightenment here because I think one of our success criteria that we've been trying the bar that we've set for the kid is like, no, soldering. Right? And maybe there's a solder version. Maybe there's a solderless version. But for me personally, Sean, I like the way you said it. For me, soldering is a bit of therapy, right? It's just I get to go over here, I get to tune my iron. I get to melt metal together. It's a beautiful thing. I enjoy it. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Very cool. Sean Tibor: I wanted to switch gears a little bit. Go ahead, Kelly. Go ahead. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: No, you can switch. I'll let you switch. I always am the one that switches. Sean Tibor: Okay, well, it wouldn't be a talk about drones if we didn't talk about hardware and what people should be looking at. And this is very selfishly for me, too, because my drone and one that I've gotten so much joy out of using and so much utility out of using is a DJI Mavic Pro. Like first generation, came out five or six years ago. Phenomenal drone, right? And if I were to upgrade it to the latest Mavic Pro, it's even more incredible. But I wanted to ask for recommendations to get started with both drones that are compatible with drone blocks that work really well for teaching different things, as well as what may be good for professional development or personal professional development around building drones, understanding how they work. And we can kind of divide it up into airborne drones versus robots. But let's just start with if I'm a teacher and I want to get some drones that will work with drone blocks, maybe five or six of them, just to get going in the classroom, is the Kelly the best place to start? Are there other drones out? Where should people be making their wish lists for? Dennis Baldwin: Know when I get asked this question, Sean, and I was kind of like, I hope Sean or Kelly don't ask this question, but it's been asked because I don't want to sound like a DJI fanboy, but DJI makes the best hardware out there, right? And so the let maybe we could draw a distinction. I don't know if this helps is indoor versus outdoor, right? Because there were days when we were flying phantoms indoor and indoors, and I think we didn't know any better. Right. But TELO for indoor precision flight programmable flight is certainly the best out there. And there are different models, as you guys probably are aware. There's TELO, telo.edu and then Talent standard know you can get at Walmart. It's very programmable with drone blocks. The telo.edu has a little bit more capabilities with mission pads where all the drones will hold position. But the mission pads can actually sort of drone can relocate to localize on a certain pad, pad number three or pad number six. So you can sort of navigate around more, maybe similarly to how you would navigate outdoors with GPS. And then the TELO talent has the little add on ESP 32 sensor so that's the indoor stuff. Now getting back to your question, Sean, of like if you're going outdoors, obviously Mavic Minis are incredible. They're tiny, they're relatively safe, they have great cameras on them. We unfortunately were not able to support the Mavic Mini years ago, it was announced and we don't have full access to GPS interface like the SDK. And so there's some challenges there. Right. Like the Mavic Pro, you can just tell it to go wherever and the GPS waypoints are followed. I don't know. We've had many conversations with DJI about the mavic mini. So outdoors currently where we stand, we haven't put a lot of focus on that. When TELO was released, we said, okay, we want to focus on in classroom curriculum hardware and then we want to see where we can go from there. And so that's where this new drone, which is PX Four based PX Four is this autopilot open source, incredible community behind it. Rdupilot is another where now you'll be able to build configure. We've worked hard to get position hold indoors. It uses a couple of sensors, a range finder and then optical flow for it to be able to hold position and be programmable. That then can be taken outdoors to do very similar things by adding a GPS to it. Right. A lightweight, cheap GPS unit. So that's more of the I'll call it kit DIY, you build it yourself. But for outdoor, like if we have these conversations every week, what outdoor hardware can we support? And the only thing that we keep coming back to is like maybe Skydio. Skydio is probably one of the better consumer prosumer drones, but we haven't really gotten full access to their SDK. So long winded way of saying that we haven't cracked the outdoor drone nut just yet. Sean Tibor: Well, that's okay, there's plenty you can do indoors. Dennis Baldwin: Right, exactly. Sean Tibor: And it's much easier to control the temperature and weather too. Dennis Baldwin: Yes. The other challenge is we partnered with a group to do part 107 curriculum. As you know, there's all the regulations of outdoor flight and what happens if you're in airspace and all of that. So it benefited us to focus on indoors, have simulation and then that's the starting place and we'll grow from there and obviously watch what the regulations do over time. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: And just to add some, while some teachers are thinking they're looking at the price, the tello is about what, 140 or something from Amazon. And you don't have to have a class set. We don't have a class set at Pinecrest. We have, I think four or five. And you share out, you code, you test, and with the simulation, I'm assuming everyone has to make a simulated flight that actually works before you can put it onto a drone itself. So that's like a tidbit for teachers just to kind of think about maybe one or two if you can get the budget. And then the other thing just from experience with the little kids. We have these nets that are built so it kind of stays in in a certain area of the room and safer and safety goggles is always a good thing to make sure you have on so that your division heads don't get mad at you. I'm not that it hurts not, but you never know. Dennis Baldwin: That's actually very kelly. We about three years ago partnered with Know, used to be Bell Helicopter. Now it's Bell Flight and they have an annual competition called sorry, yes, Aerial Vertical Robotics. They changed the name and we've supported them through documentation, helping with the build. But it's a larger drone, right? It's a competition where you're navigating around, putting out simulated fires, and the whole competition is done within a netted area because these things have like 910 inch propellers on them. So I'm always an advocate of safety. Don't always follow it maybe in the lab or in the garage, but certainly in an environment where students are around, we do. Sean Tibor: Yeah, I think that's a really good point. Things happen fast with drones and it's something that you want to make sure that you are thinking of before it happens. So definitely a good call out to think about safety and how to plan for that as part of your curriculum as well. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: And they sometimes fall behind the projector whiteboards that you have. Make sure you don't fly around there because getting one stuck in there is never fun. Sean Tibor: It's kind of like finding quarters in the couch, right. If you find a drone later, exciting, stop running. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: It no fun to be had with drones. Real quick. The robot dog, because it was so cute and some people would say it's not really cute, but is that part of drone blocks? Dennis Baldwin: What is the robot dog? Yeah, I guess, like I said, part of me, if you've been in the industry for a long time, I think I'm an optimist when it comes to software and what's going on there. And then I can be a bit of a pessimist when it comes to hardware. And you can imagine all the bad things that people can dream up to do with drones or with robot dogs. The quadruped. But we have a great relationship with Unitree and one of our partners imports them and we work together to sort of bring drone blocks compatibility to Go One. Right. And then being able to because I would love for us to sort of identify maybe the best of breed for each kind of hardware platform and then for drone blocks to support it. So right now, indoor drone Flight, it's TELO, it will be PX four. And then now we support the Go One quadruped. And so that's the drone block support. But then as I mentioned earlier, we released this JavaScript library that allows you to do autonomous control, right? And so the dog obviously the mechanics of how this thing walks and navigates is absolutely incredible. And for your listeners that might not be familiar with it, I'm sure you may be familiar with the Boston Dynamics robots, the Spot, right? Those are much bigger. The Go one is smaller in size. It's still, I think, about 25 pounds, if I recall. But we saw it as a way to create another opportunity to engage students in a classroom to learn programming, but to see the output of taking their code, whether it's Python, the block programming, JavaScript, and being able to navigate around. And we're getting close to releasing a course that shows how to do color detection, like computer vision stuff with the hardware. So we saw it as an opportunity to create more engaging content, not to be done. We're not trying to advocate anything dangerous or malicious. Right. It's just a platform where we see kind of the robotics industry heading. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Very cool. Yeah. I first saw it and I was like, oh, that looks like Spot, just not yellow. Dennis Baldwin: Right. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: I asked for a Spot, but they said no the last week. Dennis Baldwin: They're 75,000, I think. Something along those lines. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Yeah, I got a laugh, but it's so cool. I do exploratory robots, and for me, the drones are a hit. Anything that's robotic is considered exploratory robots for me, so I'm always about buying the one off bots and exploring them. Dennis Baldwin: Yeah, that's cool. We've had a handful of schools purchase them and dress them up, wrap them or whatever and make them like a school mascot. Right. I love working with teachers because they're so creative, they're so resourceful. Right. And if they get a grant or an opportunity to purchase something, the stuff that we see people do is really cool. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: That's it. I'm going to make a panther out of the quadruped. Sean Tibor: Sorry, we need a grant for teaching Python. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Yeah, exactly. We need a grant. Sean Tibor: Official map teaching Python. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Very cool. Sean Tibor: Nice. Well, I know we're running a little bit short of time, but I wanted to just give a chance, Dennis, for you to share the best way to get in touch with you to learn more about drone blocks. If people want to learn more, if they're intrigued by this and how could you not be intrigued by this topic? Where do they get started? How do they connect with you? Dennis Baldwin: So you're more than welcome to email me personally. It's just DB. Dennisbaldwin letter D. Letter B. At DroneBlocks IO. We also have support at DroneBlocks IO. If you have a more generic question and then I always advocate because I'm a supporter of Community, I love to give back because I've gotten so much from online forums. We have a form at Community. DroneBlocks IO. Sean Tibor: Very cool. Well, I will definitely be hanging out there a little bit more often. I'm already looking at the TELO talent. I think it's got a lot of cool stuff that we could do with it and have some fun with it. Go ahead, Kelly. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: I said I see this as on our Christmas wish list, Sean. We put a wish list out and I can see Sean's already. Like, this is what I'm buying. Sean Tibor: Yeah, I'm not waiting till December. Dennis Baldwin: Please put a PX four drone kit on your wish list, Sean, so we can get some more beta testers. Sean Tibor: Absolutely. I will fire up the soldering iron and we'll make it happen. All right, so I guess that pretty much does it for this week. We're going to wrap up here. Dennis, thank you for sharing all this great information with us and getting us to dream. It's funny, I think they always put it on every documentary about the Wright brothers, about flying, that as humans, we've always dreamed of flight. This is something we think about, we dream about. And one of the things I love about drones is that it makes flight more accessible to more people. It makes it something that a kid can do. It makes it something that someone who may not be able to fly for physical limitations can have a drone and even be present through FPV to be able to see what it would feel like to fly like a bird. So what you're doing with drone blocks and what you're doing to empower and enable people to think about flight and to transport themselves in a new, different way and to think differently in a new, different way is really powerful and really compelling. And so just thank you for sharing that with us and helping us dream for a little bit during the show today. For me, it meant a lot, and I know Kelly's smiling over there because it means a lot to her, too. Dennis Baldwin: Well, I just genuinely appreciate the good words and thank you for having me on. Sean Tibor: And we'll definitely have you back to talk more about drones in the future. I think for us, we have a whole lineup of guests coming over the next few weeks. Kelly's been hard at work lining up a really great lineup to talk about a variety of topics. So for our listeners, stay tuned. If you enjoyed this episode, there's plenty more coming. We'd ask as a know, we put a lot of time and effort into this show and we love doing it because it means we get to talk to great people like Dennis. Help spread the word. Help share this podcast or this episode with someone else. Leave a review for us on your podcast player of choice, whether that's itunes or Spotify or Google podcasts, wherever you're listening to this, leave us a review and help us out by sharing the word. If you have feedback for us, things that we can do or ideas for how we can add more to our show, please share this with us through our website at teachingpython FM or through Twitter at teachingpython. We're always excited to hear from our guests and hear ideas and opportunities it really has become a community around teaching, coding and computer science, and we're grateful for each of you for listening to us and sharing with us. Kelly, is there anything I'm forgetting in terms of upcoming episodes, guides, new stuff on the way that people should be looking out? Kelly Schuster-Paredes: No, not so much. I just wanted to say that if you have a suggestion for a guest, also email us. We got Dennis's name from a guest, and I was trying to remember the name. I'm sorry. Thank you. Who sent that to me? I forgot to pull that one up. But yes, they said you have to have Dennis on. He's amazing. Doing a lot of great things with drones. So if you know someone else like that, just shoot us an email and we will do our best to get in contact with them. Sean Tibor: All right, well, one more time. Thank you again, Dennis, for joining us. It's been a pleasure to have you. So for teaching Python, this is Sean. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: And this is Kelly signing off.