Russian schools have begun purchasing equipment to teach children how to use drones. Important Stories came to this conclusion after examining the data on the public procurement website.
So, Lyceum No. 1 of Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk in April purchased eight "children's" drones "Eaglet" and "Osa" for a total amount of almost 1.5 million rubles. These devices were developed in a local IT park “for schoolchildren to practice drone control skills.” The Governor of the Sakhalin Region Valery Limarenko actively supported this idea.
Orders for the purchase of “training UAVs” were placed by schools No. 583 and No. 525 in St. Petersburg, as well as the Magan secondary school in Yakutsk. The cost of each contract is about 1 million rubles. School No. 525, in addition to the drones themselves, will purchase kits “for self-assembly of quadrocopters”. In the next academic year, there will be a UAV Design and Programming program for schoolchildren aged 12-15.
School No. 50 in Kaliningrad plans to teach children not only to operate drones, but also to develop them. The administration of the educational institution is going to buy an "educational air module for the development of UAVs" for 9.4 million rubles. Another 5 million rubles were allocated for the purchase of a “Hardware and software complex for piloting an unmanned aircraft with aerial photography function”. It is noted that this school has cadet classes.
Russian schoolchildren in different regions are regularly called upon to help military personnel participating in the invasion of Ukraine. Children collect humanitarian aid, sew clothes, make dugout candles and camouflage nets. School No. 53 in Barnaul began collecting broken quadcopters in November to fix them and send them to the Russian military.
The idea to introduce a course on drone control in schools was supported by Vladimir Putin in April.