Burlington High School Students Celebrate Drone and Esports Successes

Burlington High School students are making waves with their innovative work with drones and their gaming skills in the esports arena.

LeRoy Wong, teacher in the tech exploration program, appeared before the School Committee on May 28 along with members of the school's drone team to showcase some of their accomplishments from the 2024-25 school year.

The team is set to head to the national STEM-ED Aerospace Robotics Competition at St. Anselm college this weekend. They progressed to the national competition after earning third place in May at the regional contest, which presented students with both a piloting challenge and a technical challenge that required the drone to pick up objects. The drone features a hook for lifting cubes and a claw for grasping tennis balls.

At MIT's Cyber Square World Digital Fest Summit in January, the team won first place among schools from countries all around the globe, earning them a $500 award.

Students from the drone team also participated in the 4th quarter senior internship, where they developed an autonomous drone that responds to hand gestures and facial recognition.

Voicing over a video of the drone in action, senior Mhamad Alsukairy explained, "We made it so that you could use like hand gestures to control the drone... If I move away, it'll come closer. If I turn around and walk away, it'll follow me. If I turn, if I go in another room or basically anything, it'll follow and it'll remain locked onto my face."

While some commercial drones can perform these functions, Wong said, the application software is costly, and so the students took on the challenge to program it on their own, leveraging Google's MediaPipe, a pose recognition model, for support.

A team member noted, "We thought that we would build our own AI model to track the human poses. But we realized that training a whole model in two months would be unrealistic."

Senior Alexander Chang shared his thoughts on the project: "We don't have a lot of those kinds of opportunities in school," such as a shop or auto mechanic class, "so the drone internship was the perfect way for us to get a taste of that. And I think it really helps with our learning." Chang added that the internship helped the students learn to be cost-conscious to achieve their goals within budget parameters.

Drones have applications across many industries, including real estate, news and law enforcement; autonomous drones can be used in wildlife applications, agricultural maintenance, and delivery automation, just to name a few.

The Burlington High School drone program has been in place since 2018, and the seniors in the program this year are conscious about building upon their work from last year and leaving a solid foundation for next year's team.

Wong also spoke about the school's esports team, which competes statewide in popular games like Madden, Mario Kart, and Rocket League. They've reached state championships multiple times, coming close to winning in Mario Kart and Rocket League finals.

Esports is now an officially recognized sport by the Massachusetts Interscholastic Athletic Association (MIAA) and the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), and students can receive college scholarships and professional sponsorships for playing. "We've had players that have been good for a while," said Wong. "I don't know what it is about Burlington, but we've had players that actually were professionals and were sponsored" by national brands like Snickers.

Wong stressed that while esports might lack the athleticism of other sports, the focus on team is strong – team members strategize together and build strong connections with each other.

While professional videogaming won't be everyone's path, Wong said, esports participants are well-suited to many different careers in the sports industry and often show interest in other careers in the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields. Gaming, he says, can help them build skills they need in those industries.

While the program is currently made up of more boys than girls, Wong and colleague Shereen Tyrell, Director of Career Pathways, have seen interest in STEM among girls meet that of boys, and they hope to attract more girls to the drone and esports programs in future years.