Drones: The Almond Run

1. Boot Camp — fly the drone manually
2. Flight Challenges — precision landings + obstacle course
3. — lunch —
4. Code It — write your first drone program in DroneBlocks
5. Aerial Crop Survey — program your drone to fly an almond orchard pattern

• Propellers spin fast enough to cut skin. Hands away from the drone whenever the props are spinning.
• Never grab a drone out of the air. Tell it to land. Wait.
• Eyes on your own drone. If you're not the pilot in your pair, you're the spotter — eyes up, calling obstacles.
• When you hear "PROPS DOWN," every drone lands. No exceptions.

• 1 Tello drone
• 1 charged battery
• 1 phone
• 📋 Pilot's Log

1. Find your partner. Pick a Pilot and a Spotter. You'll swap roles every 5 minutes.
2. Find your numbered drones Wifi address in the battery compartment. Memorize the number — you'll need it to connect to the right one.
3. Snap a battery in. The drone's lights blink amber when it's ready to pair.

1. Open your phone's WiFi settings.
2. Find the network that starts with TELLO-. There will be many — pick the one labeled on YOUR drone.
3. Tap to connect. Ignore any "no internet" warning — that's correct, drones don't need internet.
4. Open the Tello app. You should see the live camera view from your drone.

If you don't see a camera feed: forget the WiFi network, reconnect, and reopen the app. Most connection problems fix themselves this way.

Real pilots run a checklist before every takeoff. So do you.

Place the drone on the floor in front of you. Step back. Run your pre-flight check. Call "CLEAR." Then:

1. Takeoff — tap the takeoff button in the Tello app. The drone climbs to about 3 feet and hovers. Just watch it. Don't touch anything else for 10 seconds.
2. Land — tap the land button. Watch it come down. That's one full flight. Do this 3 times before you touch the joysticks.
3. Hover and translate — take off again. Use the left joystick (up/down/rotate) and the right joystick (forward/back/left/right). Move it 1 foot at a time. Small inputs. The drone is more sensitive than you think.
4. Swap roles. Spotter becomes pilot. Pilot becomes spotter. Repeat.

What you just did is the entry-level qualification for a commercial drone pilot. The FAA's Part 107 license is open to anyone 16 or older, costs $175, and is the legal ticket to fly drones for money. From there, the work splits into half a dozen different careers — ag surveys, real estate, construction, infrastructure, public safety, cinematography — each with its own pay, schedule, and skill set. Pilots in the Central Valley earn $35–$75 an hour. The hardest part of the test isn't flying — it's reading airspace charts.

Scoring:

• 3 points — landing gear inside the inner circle
• 2 points — landing gear inside the outer circle
• 1 point — drone touched the mat
• 0 points — drone missed the mat entirely

Take off from your home spot. Fly to the target. Hover above the center. Land. Don't rush the landing — the last 6 inches matter most.

The course is set up with hula hoops, pop-up gates, or whatever obstacles your facilitator put down. Walk it on foot first so you know where each gate is.

Rules:

• Clean run — pass through every gate without touching it
• Penalty — +5 seconds for each gate clipped or missed
• Crash — DNF (did not finish). Reset and try again.
• Spotter calls obstacles out loud. The pilot is looking at the screen, not the room.

Walk-it-first rule: before you fly the course, your partner walks it with their hand at drone height, pretending to be the drone. You watch and call the moves. Then you fly it.

First responders use drones in obstacle-heavy environments every week: searching a collapsed building after an earthquake, flying through a burning warehouse to find people, scanning a wildfire perimeter at night. CAL FIRE, the Merced County Sheriff's Office, and the California Highway Patrol all run drone programs. Search-and-rescue drone pilots are full-time public-safety employees with pensions, training, and stable salaries — and the work matters.

Watch the projector. Your instructor will demo DroneBlocks live — how blocks snap together, where the parameters go, and where the Run button lives. Pay attention to the order of blocks; that order is your program.

1. Reconnect to the room WiFi (just for this step).
2. App Store / Play Store → search DroneBlocks. The logo is a yellow drone on a blue square.
3. Install. It's free.
4. Open it. When it asks what drone type, pick Tello.
5. Switch your phone back to your TELLO-XXXXXX WiFi.

You're going to make the drone fly a square. Four sides, four turns, back to where it started.

Drag these blocks onto the canvas in this order:

Don't run it yet. Part III first.

If you walked it and ended up somewhere weird, your code is wrong. Fix it in DroneBlocks before you run it. Two ways to be wrong:

• Turn direction backward (left instead of right)
• Wrong number of forwards or turns

Walk it as many times as you need until it's right. Code that's been walked is code that flies.

1. When it's your pair's turn, place your drone at the starting mark.
2. Run your pre-flight check. Call "CLEAR."
3. Hit Run Mission in DroneBlocks. Hands off the phone.
4. Watch. The drone should fly a square and land near where it started.

What you just learned — drag-and-drop block coding — is the gateway to software engineering. Scratch, Snap, Blockly, DroneBlocks — they all teach the same thing: logic, sequence, repetition, conditionals. Real software engineers write in Python, JavaScript, or C++, but every one of them started with these same concepts. Bay Area software engineers — at companies like Skydio (autonomous drones, San Mateo), Joby Aviation (electric aircraft, Santa Cruz), or any one of dozens of ag-tech startups in Salinas and Davis — start at $120k+ out of college. Many of them got hooked on coding in a workshop like this one.

Your mission: Program your drone to fly an autonomous crop survey over the orchard your facilitator laid out on the floor — 3 rows, marked with tape or cones. Cover every row. Land at the end.

Before you open DroneBlocks, sketch the path on your Pilot's Log. The drone starts at the bottom of Row 1. It needs to:

1. Fly the length of Row 1
2. Turn left, scoot over to Row 2
3. Fly the length of Row 2 (now going the other direction)
4. Turn right, scoot over to Row 3
5. Fly the length of Row 3
6. Land

Measure (in steps, then convert to cm — 1 big step ≈ 50 cm) and write the distances on your log.

Translate your sketch into DroneBlocks. Use the same blocks you used for the square — take off, fly forward, yaw left/right, land. You'll need:

• 3 long forward flights (the rows)
• 2 short forward flights (the row-to-row scoots)
• 4 turns (alternating directions)

Then walk it. Out loud. Step by step. If the walked path doesn't cover all 3 rows, fix the code.

One pair at a time in the flight zone. Pre-flight check. Facilitator thumbs-up. Run.

Scoring (out of 5):

• 1 point — drone took off and ran the program
• 1 point — drone flew over Row 1 in its full length
• 1 point — drone flew over Row 2
• 1 point — drone flew over Row 3
• 1 point — clean landing, no crash

The boustrophedon scan you just flew is the same flight pattern precision agriculture specialists fly every day at orchards from here to Bakersfield. The pattern feeds into multispectral analysis software that detects stressed trees from canopy color before a human can see the difference. UC Merced runs ag drone research — there are agronomists, software engineers, and field technicians on staff doing exactly this work. Two-year ag-tech certificates at Merced College, Modesto Junior College, and West Hills College get you in the door at companies like Aerobotics, PrecisionHawk, and Skycatch.

Before you leave, share one word that describes today. Just one.

On your 📋 Pilot's Log, finish these three:

1. What part of today surprised you most?
2. If you could fly any drone mission in the world tomorrow, what would it be?
3. One thing you can do now that you couldn't this morning: