The mainstream of educational robotics platforms orbits the various versions of versatile robotics sets and kits, while interesting outliers add new opportunities and extend the possible learning situations. Examples of such are reconfigurable robots, rolling sphere robots, humanoids, swimming, or underwater robots. Another kind within this category are flying drones. While remotely controlled drones were a very attractive target for hobby model makers for quite a long time already, they were seldom used in educational scenarios as robots that are programmed by children to perform various simple tasks. A milestone was reached with the introduction of the educational drone Tello, which can be programmed even in Scratch, or some general-purpose languages such as Node.js or Python. The programs can even have access to the robot sensors that are used by the underlying layers of the controller. In addition, they have the option to acquire images from the drone camera and perform actions based on processing the frames applying computer vision algorithms. We have been using this drone in an educational robotics competition for three years without camera, and after our students have developed several successful projects that utilized a camera, we prepared a new competition challenge that requires the use of the camera. In the article, we summarize related efforts and our experiences with educational drones, and their use in the student projects and competition.

翻译：教育机器人平台的主流聚焦于多功能机器人套件的各类变体，而一些引人注目的非主流方案则增添了新的可能性并拓展了学习情境。例如可重构机器人、球形滚动机器人、仿人机器人、游泳机器人或水下机器人。其中的另一类便是飞行无人机。尽管遥控无人机长期以来一直深受模型爱好者青睐，但在教育场景中，它们很少被用作由儿童编程执行简单任务的机器人。随着教育无人机Tello的推出，一个里程碑得以实现：这款无人机甚至可以通过Scratch或Node.js、Python等通用语言进行编程。程序甚至可以访问控制底层所使用的机器人传感器。此外，用户还能获取无人机摄像头捕捉的图像，并基于计算机视觉算法处理图像帧来执行操作。我们已将该无人机（未搭载摄像头）用于教育机器人竞赛三年之久。当学生利用摄像头成功开发多个项目后，我们设计了一项需要调用摄像头的新竞赛挑战。本文总结了相关研究成果与我们在教育无人机方面的实践经验，并阐述了其在学生项目与竞赛中的应用。