The VEX AIR Flight Simulator enables students to learn to fly the VEX AIR Drone in a safe, virtual environment. Assessing student progress in this environment can be challenging, often requiring teachers to rely on student documentation or closely monitor individual efforts.
Flight School is designed to address this by providing clear, measurable indicators of student progress. This article describes how to use Flight School with the VEX AIR Virtual Flight Course to support assessment of students’ piloting skills.
What is Flight School?
Flight School is an assessment layer built into the VEX AIR Flight Simulator. It provides a structured way for students to demonstrate their piloting skills using missions from the Virtual Flight Course.
In the practice experience, students build skills through repetition, such as flying through rings, tracking collisions, and refining control.
Flight School builds on this by having students apply those skills in structured missions. Read this article to learn more about using Flight School within the simulator.
Each mission acts as a performance task. Upon completion, students earn a badge that can be saved and shared as evidence of progress.
Badges Display Student Progress
Each mission includes badge criteria in the Mission Log, providing clear metrics and shared performance goals. Badges are awarded based on those metrics, and each badge is unique, ensuring that it reflects the skills of an individual student. Badges include:
Different levels of performance
- Completed (orange): Mission objectives were met.
- Silver: Objectives were met with improved efficiency (fewer collisions or less time).
- Gold: Objectives were completed optimally.
Unique student flight data, including:
- Name of the mission
- Badge level
- Date flown
- Elapsed Time
- Score metric
- Distance flown
- Student name
This data ensures that each badge reflects an individual student’s performance and prevents duplicate submissions.
Badges Support Continued Growth
Earning a badge does not indicate that learning is complete. Badges are designed to support iteration and continuous improvement.
Students can repeat missions to earn higher badge levels or improve their performance metrics. Badge criteria provide clear goals, helping students focus their efforts. The shareable nature of badges means students can easily show evidence of this growth, and communicate their progress with others using shared language and performance metrics.
Badging in this way offers several key benefits:
- Fast feedback cycles: Students receive immediate results through scores and badges.
- Increased motivation: The badge system encourages iteration and improvement.
- Focused learning: Simplified layouts and guided paths keep students working on one skill at a time.
- Student ownership: Learners take responsibility for demonstrating and improving their skills.
- Scalable assessment: Educators can focus less on monitoring every attempt and more on facilitating activities and offering guidance.
Submitting Badges for Assessment
Each badge can be saved and shared with a teacher for assessment.
Selecting the Save Badge button downloads a PDF that includes the student’s entered name and performance data. Students can submit badges digitally, add them to Mission Logs, or print them for display.
Consider the following as you prepare for using Flight School with your students:
- Badge Submission – Students can submit badges digitally or as printed copies.
- Earning Multiple Badges – Students can earn multiple badges for the same mission to demonstrate improvement over time.
- Organizing Student Badge Submissions – Have students store badges with their Mission Logs to keep all flight data in one place.
- Display Badges to Communicate Student Learning – Use badges to showcase student progress. Consider displaying them in the classroom to highlight growth over time for classmates and the school community to see.