“One thing for us as far as native people is that we are really good with our hands and a lot of our kids are like that. And so when it came to building the robot, just a lot of them had that natural ability to build it, to put it together, and then to actually driving it. A lot of the kids picked it up really fast.”
“What I like about the Aerial Drone Competition is the fact that you need to have a pilot and a spotter working together. When the drone is behind the blackout curtain, the pilot is not able to see where to land, so they rely on the spotter’s voice commands. I like to see the interaction between the pilot and the spotter because it gets students talking and it gets them to be loud.”
“I feel like we as native people have a resiliency built within us. And by that I mean, anyone you talk to here, they’ll bring that resiliency. We just have this rubber band effect. They can stretch us so far, but we’ll come back. When students build their robots, they could fail. They’ll see that as a negative experience and they’ll be like, “Oh, I don’t want to be here anymore. I don’t want to be on this team anymore.” Yet they still come back.
“The Governor of New Mexico saw us on TV because we qualified for Drone Nationals, and she put funding away for us. It opened up a door to where they could use that funding to have a NASA engineer work with us during our elective hour during school. So we’ll be learning how to code with Python, the coding they use at Tesla.”
