An Innovative Approach to Teach Geography Based on the Hanging Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Device

Abstract

Recently, it has become a major trend to teach STEM students the application of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) technology as a part of their higher education. While teaching basic cartography for geography majors, students use paper maps to find data such as altitude, vegetation coverage area, mountain and river locations, and use them to draw maps, altitude graphs or use applications such as ArcGIS to make maps. In this process, students often get confused while searching for the data, which leads to mistakes in their drawing work. In order to solve the problem, an innovative teaching method that incorporates UAV education into the teaching process is therefore proposed. Using the custom made UAV device, students not only experience how to collect the data that they need and be able to distinguish between different data accurately and efficiently, but also learn how to use different data to produce different results in the mapping process. In order to solve the high cost and high-risk problem in UAV testing process, and also to make the process of testing the attitude of UAVs in the classroom closer to the real situation, we made a custom hanging UAV testing device. The students that participated in the study gave positive feedback on the new teaching method of using the custom-made UAV device.