Host Drones in School Races at Your Location!
Become an Event Partner!
Want to have a race in your area? You can host one! All you need to host a race is a gymnasium or similar size indoor space, a few volunteers and the basic race equipment. Event partners set up Drones in School races on the event registration website. Event partners keep the registration fees and general admission for all events.
How Do Events Work? :
Drones in School events can have any or all of the following: Head-to-Head Race, Capture the Flag Race, Portfolio / Display Judging, Design and Engineering Judging, and Marketing Video Judging. When you create your event on the RACES website, you will specify what components will be judged at your race event. For example, if it's early in the season and schools have not yet created new frames, you might have a "race only" event where students are allowed to run their stock frames. In this example, you would award a Head-to-Head and Capture the Flag Champion, but the other award categories would not be given. For a deeper look at the entire process for race operations, please refer to our Race Operations Overview Document.
Event Payments and Process: All Drones in School teams must register as an official team and register for any events at races.multigp.com. Therefore, Event Partners must post their events on RACES as well. Event Partners incur the cost of hosting their event(s), and most charge a small team registration fee to cover these expenses. It is up to the Event Partner to determine what they need to charge to cover their local costs, but most one-day event fees range from $25-$75 per team. Event Partners set the fee for their event.
Event Dates: Events can take place anytime in the year. However, for a race to earn Season Qualifier Points, it must take place between October 1st and March 15th.
Number of Teams: Drones in School races are designed to be held in an afternoon (after school). You can expect a sixteen-team race to take around 3 hours using a double-elimination bracket. If your race is eight teams or less, the bracket will run as a round-robin tournament. An eight-team race will take about 2.5 hours.
To be an official event that awards season points, there must be at least two schools and four teams participating.
Number of Judges: At the beginning of the race you will need 2-3 judges to evaluate the drones and complete the Drone Inspection Sheet for each team. You will need 2-3 judges for "Portfolio and Display" and 2-3 judges for "Design and Engineering". These judges will complete their judging as teams are racing. For the races, you will need two teams of judges. Each judging team should consist of a starter, a timer, and at least two referees. The referees will count laps for the head-to-head race and will score the capture the flag race. You should also assign one person as scorekeeper to tabulate all scores as judges complete their work, so you will be ready to give awards when the last race is completed.
Equipment: The race equipment consists of gates and flags for the Head-to-Head race and beacons for the Capture the Flag Race.
- Capture the Flag Beacons can be purchased from Drones in School
- For Head-to-Head races, you can purchase a
STEM Drone Racing Gate Bundle or design your own track using gates with a minimum opening of 900 cm2.
Additional resources can be found in our Team/Event Partner Resources shared folder.
To become an Event Partner, email info@dronesinschool.com with the Subject "New Event Partner" in the body of the email and include the following information about the race event you want to host:
- Event Name:
- Event Date:
- Start Time:
- Anticipated End Time:
- Name of event location:
- Address of the event location:
- Event Divisions: Middle School, High School or Both
- Are you going to have all of the components for a live race? (Head-to-Head Racing, Capture the Flag, Portfolio & Display, Engineering & Design, Marketing Video) If not, what components are you going to include?
- Are you going to charge a registration fee for the events? If yes, please provide the amount of this fee so we can include it in the registration.
- Event Contact Person: Name with an email address and/or phone number
- Any additional details: (Special instructions for entering the venue, lunch options, spectator entry costs, etc.)
Our team will set up your event and make you the event admin so you can see who registers and adjust the event details as needed.
Professional Race Event Production
To give your event a more professional feel, consider adding video feeds and timing to your head-to-head racing. This will involve a little more tactical skill and some additional equipment, but many teams like the fact that you're spectators and other students can see the FPV video for each pilot during a race.
FPV Video Receiver
The most requested option for hosting races is getting the FPV video feeds for the pilots onto a screen or projector so everyone can see what they are seeing in their goggles. The cheapest way to do this is to use two HDZero Monitors. These small screens have HDMI outputs, so you can easily connect them to a display that everyone can see.
Software
The first thing you'll need to get lap times and video showing up on a display is timing software. There are several options out there, but we recommend FPVTrackside. It is fairly user-friendly, and FPV racer Evan Turner (HeadsupFPV) has a great tutorial video to help get you started. You can also use the HDZero Monitors above with FPVTrackside to integrate video with the timing display.
Timer
To get accurate times, you'll need a way to detect the drones as they pass by your timing gate. The best option on the market is the ImmersionRC LapRF 8, 8-way timer from ORQA. There are other options available, ranging from open-source build-your-own units to timers built by FPV community members. However, the 8-way timer is the most reliable option currently available.
