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In the hallways of Thomas Jefferson University’s East Falls campus, a quiet, 12-year-old Aarna Channappagoudar was about to launch the inaugural test flight of a drone that she, and several other kids, designed and built themselves.
The drone, which has a small plastic core with four legs sticking out, rose unsteadily, and began to make a loop.
“OK,” said camp counselor Olivia Hannallah, a rising senior at Thomas Jefferson University, where she studies engineering. “Can you have it come back?”
Channappagoudar fiddled with the controls. The drone rose higher, hovered for a moment — and then smacked into the wall and dropped to the floor. Channappagoudar, though, was undeterred.
“I think it’s going great,” she said, “because we have a lot of ideas to add to the drone to make it fly better.”
Experimentation and troubleshooting are all a part of the design process at Thomas Jefferson University’s annual STEM camp, a free, three-week program aimed at nurturing the next generation of engineers through programs focusing on science, technology, engineering and math.