Drones with a Purpose: Two JUMP Challenges in Lodz and Toulouse
Lodz University of Technology and INSA Toulouse offer two drone challenges that develop an entrepreneurial mindset and responsible innovation skills, from designing a mission to creating a competition for high-school students.
How can a drone help monitor industrial noise? And how can that application become a competition that high-school students can take part in safely?
Lodz University of Technology and INSA Toulouse have brought these questions together in a learning pathway. Their two complementary challenges give students room to take initiative and turn a technical idea into something useful for a specific audience.
Design the Skies: Drone Challenge for Industrial Maintenance
- Blended challenge
- Lodz University of Technology · 3 ECTS
International student teams design a drone mission for industrial noise monitoring and test its feasibility. They decide how the mission could work and what evidence would show that it can be carried out safely under the technical and practical constraints of the challenge. The format combines online teamwork with a mobility week in Poland. All essential activities are also accessible remotely.
Explore Design the Skies on ECIU Engage
Drone Competition Lab
- Blended challenge
- INSA Toulouse · 3 ECTS
The challenge provider, the Campus des Métiers en Aéronautique et Spatial d’Occitanie, wants to give high-school students a hands-on introduction to industrial and aeronautical careers. To respond to that brief, INSA Toulouse mechanical engineering students prepare a drone equipped with acoustic sensors and set up the competition field as part of their Interdisciplinary Project.
International teams build on this setup to design the competition. They write rules that high-school students can follow, define safety procedures and develop a scoring system that reflects what the competition is meant to assess. The challenge combines online preparation with a required week in Toulouse from 18 to 22 January 2027.
Explore Drone Competition Lab on ECIU Engage
How the two challenges complement each other
The entrepreneurial dimension lies in the choices students make. In Lodz, they turn an industrial need into a mission and gather evidence that their idea is feasible. In Toulouse, they adapt a technical setup so that younger students can use it safely and understand what they are being asked to do. Together, these activities illustrate what responsible innovation means in practice: checking that an idea can work and considering who will use it, under what conditions and with what safeguards.
Students can take either challenge independently and earn 3 ECTS, or complete both for a total of 6 ECTS.
Institut National des Sciences Appliquees
France
The INSA Group, France's leading network of public engineering schools, trains 20,000 students every year. With 100,000 graduates worldwide, it is founded on the values of inclusion, openness, high standards and scientific excellence.
With nearly 80 specialisations, 58 laboratories and transformative projects, it works to promote a fairer and more sustainable society.
Lodz University of Technology
Poland
Łódź University of Technology is a technical university located in the heart of Europe and Poland, in the climatic, post-industrial city of Łódź. We educate nearly 11,000 students each year in over 60 fields of study, conducted in 3 languages at 9 faculties.
We are a student-centred university that implements Design Thinking, Challenge-Based Learning and Flipped Classroom to best prepare our future graduates for the demands of the labour market. We actively cooperate with business and industry and provide our students with modern study facilities on our 37-hectare campus.
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