Parrot

These were the first 3 drones that I used for teaching coding. We have 2 Airbornes (the one in the center of the picture), and 1 Rolling Spider (the red one on the right in the picture). At the time, the only app for coding the Parrot minidrones was the Tynker app. It is ONLY available on tablets with Android or iOS. It is a nice all-inclusive app that starts with teaching block coding to students through platformer style video games. They can then move on to coding the physical drones as well as other robots. The app is free, but has in-app purchases to unlock additional content, as well as an education package. The training and drone coding can all be done with the free content.

Apple's Swift Playgrounds now has resources available for coding the Parrot minidrones. I will be exploring them soon.

At this time we only had 3 drones, but began to run into problems with connections between the drones and the tablets. Using a Bluetooth connection, the tablets would sometimes link with the wrong drone. Sometimes when a team had to change batteries in their drone, they could not reconnect. There is a "classroom" setting where you type in the name of the drone you want to connect to, but this never worked for us.

The drone on the left in the picture is the Mambo. It replaced the Airbornes and has a BB launcher, and a gripper.

Sadly the These mini drones from Parrot are no longer being manufactured. You can still find them on the secondary market. They still make a great starter drone!