DJI’s involvement in education can be regarded as a protracted conspiracy.

On the afternoon of March 9, DJI held an online press conference and released the RoboMaster EP education development kit. DJI said that its supporting teaching aids, courses and teaching materials will provide complete robot education services for professional education institutions and teachers. This is also an extension of the launch of the first educational robot, RoboMaster S1, on June 12, 2019.

Although RoboMaster EP and S1 are similar in form, DJI is more tempting to promote EP development kits. It changed its wording and said that EP is an extension of S1’s functions and scenes: For the products developed for home education scenarios, the launch of RoboMaster EP makes it possible for the RoboMaster series to be applied in more scenarios, and also fills some of our vacancies in the professional education market, making our education service system more complete. br>

“RoboMaster EP’s positioning is not only to become the best teaching aid for new engineering teaching. We also hope to use it to let more organizations organize and join the enlightenment of robot education for young people.” Said in a press release.

Live live online-Faced with the epidemic, including technology companies such as Xiaomi, and even major automakers at the Geneva Motor Show have chosen this form of release that does not require an on-site audience-this releaseAt the meeting, DJI said that RoboMaster EP has added rich hardware on the basis of S1 to meet the needs of more teaching scenarios. It is an educational robot created by DJI for professional robot education scenarios, which is what we often call the to B business.

DJI does not announce the retail price because it is to B. DJI employees said to Tiger Sniff that if ordinary users want to buy, they can inquire on the official website, and sales will contact them.

According to DJI, RoboMaster EP is compatible with multi-party hardware, and its substrate structure is compatible with the Lego structural system. The open SDK supports more than 50 programmable sensor interfaces and is equipped with comprehensive artificial intelligence and competition courses. In the demonstration, when the EP was connected to Baidu AI, the EP became a tank-shaped artificial intelligence assistant, which could take pictures of its own camera by voice and transmit them to the mobile phone in real time. It was also possible to turn on the TV at home through voice control. . In addition, DJI has also added AI functions such as automatic obstacle avoidance on its proud drone products to product development.

In order to cope with different teaching scenarios, RoboMaster EP, like S1, supports two programming languages, Scratch3.0 and Python 3.6, supports writing virtual controls through Python, and designing interactive interfaces by itself. DJI has also provided courses for it, including student books, teacher’s manuals, engineering diaries and courseware.

In order to have greater influence, DJI also tried to transplant 5 years of experience in hosting the RoboMaster Mecha Masters for college students to a new event. It announced that this year it will host The RoboMaster Youth Challenge is divided into a low-level group of 9-15 years old and a high-level group of 15-19 years old. It is used as a complete set of RoboMaster EP solution and also as the undergraduate competition.

“You can participate in RoboMaster high school student robot theme holiday camps in advanced grades to learn and train robot operations, and participate in college competitions in college.” DJI said.

DJI revealed that its investment in education can be traced back to 7 years ago. Five years ago, the RoboMaster Mecha Masters was held in Shenzhen every summer for college students. Today, with the release of the RoboMaster EP, this event is further down to the elementary and middle school students. This is obviously related to the current popularity of artificial intelligence concepts and the increasing maturity of the industry.

The entry into the field of primary and secondary school education also highlights DJI’s ambition to expand business boundaries. In fact, it is not only DJI. If you search on the e-commerce platform, various programming robots with STEAM education slogans are emerging endlessly, and the selling price is 1200, 2,000 or 3,000 yuan. Obviously, in any field, children ’s money All are the best to make, this is a huge market that cannot tolerate DJI’s absence.

DJI also emphasized that it has invested 350 million yuan in the RoboMaster college competitions in the past five years, and has been seeking the possibility of commercialization and realization. “Run a high-quality and high-level technical competition, develop education professionals, and The goal of making this business commercially successful is not conflicting. ”

At the same time, DJI’s active promotion of investment and progress in education is also related to the declining market demand for DJI’s star business aerial drones in the past few years, especially in aerial government drones around the world. After the resistance measures such as flight restrictions became strict, DJI significantly reduced the speed of launching new drone products, and instead actively developed other product lines, including the development of handheld gimbals, OSMO series action cameras and pocket cameras.

Now it just opens up a new line. But as a brand new business, especially RoboMaster EP is targeted at educational institutions such as primary and secondary schools, how to get these schools to pay the bill will be the biggest problem. Especially in the context of parents of elementary and middle school students squeezing their children’s spare time as much as possible to report their children to various tuition classes, how much interest or autonomy students have to participate in RoboMaster EP education is unknown, and what budget is the school willing to invest? It is also unknown to teach training courses with teachers.

Especially for middle school students in the high age group of 15 to 19 years old, they are in the sprinting stage of the college entrance exam with thousands of horses and horses. Whether they have enough time and willingness to participate in the competition, DJI did not say.

Put aside these annoying questions, even if all goes well, can those children who spend a lot of spare time participating in RoboMaster youth events get extra points for their studies or academic performance?

In short, DJI is involved in the field of education, especially in the field of primary and secondary education. Whether the schools, teachers, and parents behind students will buy the bill will be the key to DJI’s success or failure, and it will also depend on the support of the education sector.

Let’s focus on participation.