Inspiring and engaging high school students with science and technology education in regional Australia

In the last two decades, there was a continuing declining participation rate in STEM education, especially in secondary schools in regional Australia. To reverse this trend and inspire rural school students with science and technology education, both federal and state governments identify the new strategies to promote STEM engagement of school students. In this study, with Queensland government’s Engaging Science funding support, Central Queensland University researchers collaborated with rural school to deliver a demonstration with hand-on experiences of drone technologies to students. The activity led students to understand the application of drone technologies in daily life, especially agriculture sector. These activities impressed local communities including both teachers and students by demonstrating real-world problem-solving skills, with increasing over 25% participating students’ interest in STEM education. This also leads more future collaboration opportunities to deliver other projects to supporting rural schools’ STEM education. Future challenge for conducting these activities would be preparing the activity materials that fit the learning style and time schedule for different knowledge levels of students.