“It was important for us to educate people about the education we’ve been getting,” Wiscasset Middle High School senior Bryan Dunning said after the Nov. 19 School Committee meeting.

Dunning and fellow students in a new class on drones had just shared some of their learning with the committee that in August freed up trust money to fund the class. A split vote of the Wiscasset Board of Selectmen had left the class unfunded. Then the committee voted to tap the Seth J. Wingren Fund.

“The class was controversial with the selectmen,” Dunning said in an interview. The presentation, updating the committee on the course, was a way to show what the class was all about, he said.

Wiscasset High School graduate and University of Maine at Orono graduate Jesse Hinman thanked the committee for making the course possible; it grew from an idea he approached the school with several months ago.

“(It) introduces students to skills and technologies they might otherwise never be exposed to,” Hinman told the committee. “Across Maine (and) the nation, we’ve seen schools that have seen what we’ve done here and are attempting to emulate what we’ve started, so that’s really exciting.”

Avery Thomas said the class is probably his favorite one. He has learned about drones’ history and about safety with drones, including being aware of the safety needs of Wiscasset Municipal Airport. “We’re really close to an airport so we have to be extra safe so we don’t hit airplanes. We have to avoid that.”

Talks the students had with airport staff early on helped form a relationship that is important to the class, science teacher Dawn Jones said. The school notifies the airport when drones are flying, and has airport manager Frank Costa’s cell phone number, Jones said.

Drones are used in sporting events, the military and in the real estate business, as well as in transportation and marine biology, students said. “The physics of flying the drones is very interesting ...  and they’re very mechanically simple,” junior Joseph McGrath said. “Drone technology wouldn’t be possible without the advent of computer science allowing there to be really efficient micro-controllers that effectively keep the thing from just flipping over as it’s flying. These things would be impossible to fly without those systems running.”

The class has also discussed events in the news about drones, McGrath said.

Dunning told the committee what, for him, has been the best part of the class so far. “(It) is actually building our own drone, and getting the satisfaction of knowing we’ve built something that we get to fly.”

Each drone has small pins that have to soldered. “And they’re very tiny, and it takes a long time to get those perfect,” Dunning said. “We were connecting a pin, and we ran into a problem where we had soldered a piece in that we didn’t need, necessarily, so (we) had to unsolder it, and that was quite the experience. It’s a lot of problem-solving,” he said about drone-building.

Jones showed a video clip of aerial footage the students shot at Chewonki Foundation with drones.

The current class is all boys; one girl had begun to take it but was unable to continue, Jones said.

School Committee Chairman Steve Smith said the presentation was great. He didn’t know the course would involve so much mechanical engineering, he said.

The committee, school department officials and other attendees applauded the presentation. Committee member Chelsea Haggett thanked Hinman for his efforts on the drones course.

WMHS technology coordinator Deb Pooler said she appreciated Hinman’s wanting to give back to the school; she would love to see more of that among graduates, she said. “They’re all out there doing wonderful things, but to have somebody come back and share with his school, something that’s really important, and you saw the kids — this is great,” she said.