Collaborate To Innovate

Drones4Good won an award!

The award is made out of wood from the old
Bloomsbury theatre - plus Lego.

And it has a special skill - when you flick
the switch it lights up!

We won the UCL Engineering Engagement Awards 2018, Collaborate to Innovate Special Award for our work with the Drones4Good masterclasses and the "Engineers Save Lives" series. We owe a very big thank you to Elpida (@UCLEngEdu) for believing in us when we said that we could get 14 year olds building and flying their own drones.

The award and the certificate.

How we got to this point is an interesting story. First, @en_topia went out to Lima where they flew drones to map the favela. After she came back she wrote a grant proposal for some money to do outreach work, which linked us up with Martin (@sociablephysics). Our first event was the student competition at the first ever UK Drone Show, after Andy (@digitalurban), our Director, gave us the money to go. Olly and Nathan joined us there for all the fun.

You can see me fly, crash (softly), fix and fly again here: Drone Show Report.

Shortly after that Martin introduced us to Elpida and the "Royal Institution Coding for Year 9" masterclass and the "Lunar Lander to Pod Racing" idea was born. Well, actually it took 3 months of development work until I flew the first prototype in the student room in CASA.

The first design was the CASA X, shortly followed
by the butterfly, ghost and dragonfly.

Andy had printed @en_topia 's iconic butterfly design and Anouchka was one of the students who saw the first flight. She was transfixed by the butterfly and was brilliant when she helped us out with the first Drones4Good masterclass, along with Martin, Nathan and Olly, a few weeks later.

After that, we did another class for Hackney University Extension (16 years) with Mercedes and Mateo. For someone who had only just learnt to fly a drone, Mercedes is a natural.

We then did an "Engineers Save Lives" masterclass with Mercedes, Mahendra and Will:

Then the last "Engineers Save Lives" class was last February, this time with Jose, Anna Min and Tianjiao.

We're all in there somewhere - we forgot to do the
group shot this time around.

Finally, we also had the fantastic opportunity to go to the Big Bang Science Fair with the 3D printer and the drone simulator, this time using the LeapMotion controller. This was a much better idea than using the XBox controller, as you can see from the view of us in the middle of a crowd of excited children in the picture below.

You can't go wrong with butterfly quadcopter rings.

So that's how we got here...

The awards ceremony - you can see the awards
glowing in the background.

I wonder what the future holds?