The Sidewinders Racing Team - High School Drone Racing

Meet the Sidewinders Racing Team

We are a high school drone racing team dedicated to building, racing, and marketing our drones while seeking sponsorships and support from the community.

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Innovative, Passionate, and Driven High Schoolers

Years Into Our Mission

Learn

Drone Racing

Explore our projects in high school drone racing initiatives.

Team Development

Building skills through teamwork and drone racing experiences. Look though our team page for more or check out our blog!

Sponsorship Outreach

Engaging sponsors to support our drone racing team. Check out our sponsorship opportunities!

Drone Design

Learn about our progress of innovative designs for competitive drone racing performance.

Race Events

We participate in exciting competitions to showcase our skills.

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Team

Blog

Drones in Schools

Drones in School is a unique educational program that develops aeronautics, engineering, project management, entrepreneurship, graphic design, and marketing skills. Drones in School is a comprehensive event that challenges students to go beyond their current skills through a fun and engaging process that wraps around the exciting sport of drone racing.

What Is It?

Competition?

Drones in School teams compete in six categories. These categories provide learning opportunities for a variety of student interests. Student teams can demonstrate mastery of various learning competencies through these competition areas. Which Include: Specification Judging, Portfolio and Team Display, Disign and Engineering, Marketing Video, Head-to-Head racing, and lastly capture the flag.

We Must...

Drones in School teams design and build/improve two racing drones, create a team display, portfolio, and marketing video. Teams earn points based on their race performance and how the judges score their display booth, engineering and technical skills, marketing video, and portfolio. These scores combine to award the overall race event champion. This structure provides an opportunity for any student to be involved in this program and find success.

This Season...

The annual Drones in School Season Guide is released in August, and face-to-face race events begin in October. In addition to locally hosted face-to-face race events, teams can participate in monthly virtual races where they can record head-to-head race results and submit the marketing video, portfolio, and display through an online portal. The event judging team analyzes each of these items based on a rubric in the annual season guide. Virtual races allow any school to set up a track and participate in global events.

During a face-to-face event, teams will participate in two types of races, a head-to-head race, and a capture the flag race, in addition to video, portfolio, and display judging.

By participating in face-to-face or virtual events, teams earn points throughout the season in hopes of earning an invitation to the national race at the end of the season (late April / May).

Through the Years...

Last year, our beloved team manager, Ellen Vance, started up FAU High School's very first Drones in School Club. At our school there was little to no options for people interested in the field of fight and aeronautics. This became a huge opportunity for kids interested in this field. Although, like most clubs, it took time for the word to spread about the club.

Last year, in the 2023-24 season, we started the very first drone racing team at FAU High School. We eventually named ourselves the Sidewinders, due to our nerdy, but true interest in the field of aeronautic technologies.

We started off with 7 team members, Ellen, Emily, Matteo, Armaan, Kaylee, Christian, and Daniel.

We participated in many competitions.

In the 2023-2024 Live Race Team Standings we were placed 14th nationally.

In the 2023-2024 Simulator Race Team Standing we were placed 11th nationally.

In the 2023-2024 Virtual Race Team standings we were placed fourth nationally.

Last year in the 2023-2024 overall we missed the ability to go to nationals by one point. This year in the 2024-2025 season we are laser-focused on making it to nationals in Houston Texas.

With the new season starting, we lost about half of our team. Leaving only Emily, Matteo, and Ellen. However the losses opened the doors for us to make a new and improved team.

We quickly found Leah, Aiden, Gabriel, and Ali.

And with a new season and new people we rebranded, making a new logo and team identity.

We also made an Instagram, as well as this new website for a new look and a brighter sponsor outreach program.

Overall we are very excited to start our 2024-2025 Drones in Schools season.

However, in order to reach our goals, we need your help and support.