We are currently assisting Professor Kenya Covington with preparations for her Public Policy course on Race, Class, Gender, and Spatial Inequality which will be taught in the Spring Quarter of 2026. She first reached out to our studio in July of 2025 and was designing a course to introduce students to the concept of spatial inequality. Our collaboration is made possible by the Teaching and Learning Center’s Sandbox grant. This fund has allowed us to accompany Kenya to visit multiple sites and capture drone footage, edit and annotate them as well as provide a drone workshop for her students and conduct an additional field training for them to have hands-on practice with our departmental drones. We also plan to utilize a VR Drone Simulator application as an alternative training module for students and will continue to document the progress of this course.

Below is the short course description for the catalogue:

Introduction to spatial inequality, its causes and public policy responses used to address social, political and economic challenges faced by individuals and communities. Students engage in experiential learning of spatial inequality in collaboration with community organizations through guided drone image retrieval. Lecture seminars align spatial inequality images with sociological explanations of the phenomenon. A portion of the course is dedicated to dynamic discussions of promising policy responses. Assignments nurture development of critical thinking, understanding of a diverse set of communities, and analytical skills used to document cases, causes and consequences of spatial inequality.