Drone Programming Course at HKMA David Li Kwok Po College

COXANA Innovation Limited was proud to partner with HKMA David Li Kwok Po College to deliver the Drone Programming Course during the 2025/26 school year. The course ran for 10 lessons from September 2025 through April 2026, with 15 students taking part. A small-class format ensured every participant had ample hands-on flight time.

The course had two layers of ambition. The first was technical mastery of drone programming and core flight control. The second, and the one we care about more, was pushing students beyond the textbook to turn what they learned into innovative responses to real social and environmental challenges in Hong Kong.

Instructor-led breakdown of drone architecture and flight principles, building the hardware literacy that programming depends on.

Part 1: Drone Programming and 3D Spatial Navigation

Our instructor worked from first principles, explaining the underlying structure of a drone and the physics of flight. Unlike programming on a flat screen, flying a drone means operating in a three-dimensional world. The course therefore placed heavy emphasis on 3D Spatial Navigation: coordinate control, waypoint mapping, and sensor-based obstacle avoidance.

Technically, students began with manual control of Tello EDU / Hula compact drones, then moved to writing flight programmes through a graphical interface (GUI) on iPad. At the advanced stage, a router station allowed multiple drones to be controlled simultaneously, introducing the coordination logic behind swarm formations.

Students programming flight paths through an iPad GUI, translating spatial concepts into executable routes.

By writing and running real flight code, students came to understand that drone programming is far more than remote-control commands. It fuses precise solid geometry with spatial computation logic, laying a solid technical foundation for applied work later in the course.

Part 2: From Technology User to Active Problem Solver

We have always believed that good STEM education should not stop at "learning to operate". It should build a sense of social responsibility and genuine problem-solving capability.

In class, the instructor used guided questioning and group discussion to draw out creative thinking. We encourage students to stop being passive consumers of technology and become active social problem solvers, asking how technology could improve the community around them. In practice, this became a hands-on exercise in Design Thinking applied to the low-altitude economy: identify a real pain point first, then answer it with technology.

Part 3: Student Projects Responding to Real Hong Kong Challenges

Group discussion and project planning: students define problems worth solving, starting from their own observations.

Towards the end of the course, students showed remarkable creativity, designing and planning three drone projects with real social application value:

1. Construction Site Fire and Safety Risk Detection

Context and pain point: Safety monitoring on high-density construction sites is difficult, and fire incidents carry severe consequences.

Student solution: An automated patrol routine, programmed so that drones can enter high-risk or confined areas of a site to detect heat sources and safety hazards, significantly reducing the physical risk carried by frontline inspectors.

2. Urban Lost-Pet Search System

Context and pain point: Hong Kong's living environment is dense. When a pet goes missing among multi-storey buildings and complex streets, owners often have nowhere to turn.

Student solution: Systematic search paths and identification logic, planning efficient grid flight patterns to help residents locate missing pets faster in parks and public spaces.

3. Rural Tree-Planting Seed Dispenser

Context and pain point: Hong Kong's country parks and hillside greening need continuous maintenance, but much of the steep terrain is hard to reach on foot.

Student solution: A seed-pod release mechanism combined with precise terrain adaptation, letting a drone follow a pre-set route and safely distribute seeds across areas that are difficult to access by hiking, supporting local ecological restoration.

The outcome of a full school year and 15 hours of instruction: from basic control to socially meaningful project design.

Closing Thoughts

Through the Drone Programming Course, we saw just how far secondary students can go when programming skill meets social awareness. The value of STEM education lies exactly here: helping a younger generation see the human warmth and real change that technology can carry.

If you are interested in COXANA's drone programming and STEM courses, please explore our website or get in touch. We look forward to working with more schools to advance innovative education that is both forward-looking and grounded in reality.

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Drone Programming Course: From 3D Spatial Navigation to Social Innovation