How much does it cost to start a school drone program?
The hardware number and the ones that appear on no vendor quote.
What is genuinely free, what each free thing is actually good for, and what none of it replaces. For teachers building a course before there is a budget for one.
Short answer, before the detail. Parts of one are. Free material in this category falls into three groups that are easy to confuse: complete sample lessons taken out of a paid course, the FAA’s own free study material for the Part 107 certificate, and activity libraries that give you ideas rather than a sequence. FTW gives away three complete Build Fly Code lessons with no form to fill in. What is in them, and what a free lesson set does not replace, is below.
Complete sample lessons. Real lessons lifted out of a paid course. The test is whether you get the artifacts a teacher actually needs to run the class: a lesson plan, the slides, and a student workbook. If what arrives is a summary, an outline or a video tour, it is a preview of a course rather than a piece of one. Worth checking before you spend an evening on it.
Federal study material. The FAA publishes real material for the Part 107 remote pilot certificate, free, and it is the same material the exam is written from. It is a certificate track, not a classroom course: there is no lesson plan, no pacing and nothing for a student who is not sitting the exam.
Activity libraries. Collections of individual challenges and project ideas. Genuinely useful for a club night or a filler day. What they are not is a sequence, and stitching thirty of them into a course that survives a department review is the work they leave you.
Three lessons, one from each rung of the ladder, free to download with nothing to fill in first. Each one ships with the teacher lesson plan, the slide deck and the student workbook that every paid Build Fly Code lesson includes. They are not trailers. They are three real lessons pulled straight out of the course, so reading them tells you what the rest looks like.
Lesson 1. Students get airborne for the first time and navigate Hopper through a tic-tac-toe pattern on the ground.
Lesson 1. Students explore how drones support indoor agriculture and code Hopper to inspect vertically stacked rows of crops.
Mission 1. Students define airspace classification and work out how to identify safe and compliant operational areas.
All three are on the curriculum page.
TRUST is free and cannot be failed. The Recreational UAS Safety Test is required under 49 U.S.C. 44809 for anyone flying recreationally in the National Airspace System. It costs nothing, never expires, and you retry each question until it is right. It is a safety acknowledgment, not a license and not a credential.
Indoors, none of it is required. FAA authority under both Part 107 and 44809 runs to the National Airspace System, which is outdoor airspace. The FAA’s own guidance is that Part 107 does not apply to operations conducted indoors. A program flying in a gym, a classroom or a cafeteria needs no TRUST, no registration and no Part 107. Worth settling before it goes into a syllabus, because it changes what you have to schedule.
Part 107 study material is free; the exam is not. The FAA publishes the Remote Pilot Small UAS Study Guide and a set of sample Unmanned Aircraft General questions as free PDFs. The exam itself is $175 at an FAA-approved knowledge testing center. The minimum age is 16 under 14 CFR 107.61, so in a high school the certificate track reaches grades 11 and 12 and no lower.
A free lesson set is enough to answer the question you actually have, which is whether a sequence fits your students and your room. It is enough to run a class or two and see how they respond.
It is not a year. It does not carry the pacing, the assessment or the progression that a department review asks about, and it does not include the drone, the platform or anyone to call when a motor fails in week six. At FTW that is the paid part.
If the three lessons work with your students, what a full program costs is the next question, and the answer is on its own page with the numbers in the first paragraph.
The hardware number and the ones that appear on no vendor quote.
What to look for, and what to ask before a purchase order goes out.
Money your district already receives, and how to write the pathway in.
Three questions worth asking any vendor, including this one.
Seven things, taken from what drone employers are asking for right now.
Hopper Firmware 2.0 is here. A brand new sensor fusion and flight stability algorithm delivers decisively better flight.
Hopper holds position better, responds more precisely, and handles rough landings without drama. Crash detection was rebuilt, so a normal landing no longer leaves the drone unable to take off again.
Every Hopper gets it. Free. It loads onto drones already in the field through the FTW Fly app in a few minutes. Nothing to buy, nothing to ship back, no new hardware.
That is possible because FTW owns its entire flight control and telemetry stack. American built, wholly owned, zero outside dependency. When the software gets better, the drones already in your classroom get better with it.
Watch the walkthrough, then open FTW Fly and update yours.