Elevating K Thru Life.
One flight path from a kindergartner's first block of code to a research lab's autonomous flight.
DroneBlocks turns drones into a thinking tool for every learner: block coding → Python → ROS 2 → applied research. We started in 2015, in a Texas school library, and today more than 100,000 students have learned on what grew from that afternoon.
Trusted by top organizations and 100,000+ students
DroneBlocks is the best all-around high school drone education program.
The Drone Girl (Sally French), 2025 · thedronegirl.com
A small team having a lot of fun.
We're educators, engineers, and tinkerers who genuinely love this stuff. We stay curious, build in the open, and try new ideas before we're sure they'll work, and we don't take ourselves too seriously. Meet the people behind the platform.
Photos coming soon, the crew is camera-shy for about five more minutes.
Why drones · Why education · Why now
Why drones
A drone is the rare classroom tool that's physical and programmable at once. Kids see their code fly, the fastest way to make abstract logic concrete.
100,000+ students have coded with DroneBlocks
Why education
We're a curriculum company that happens to ship hardware. Everything starts from what a teacher can run on Monday.
19 educators tell their own classroom stories
Why now
AI and autonomy are the literacy this generation needs. The skills our oldest students use to fly an autonomous mission are what industry hires for today.
From block coding to PX4 + ROS 2, one platform
It started in a school library.
DroneBlocks didn't start in a boardroom, it started in a school library. In 2015, engineer Dennis Baldwin and teacher Marisa Vickery had a class of students in Dripping Springs, Texas build a quadcopter from 3D-printed parts and fly it by snapping coding blocks together. From that day, DroneBlocks was born: founded, fittingly, by a teacher and an engineer.
That first classroom became a blueprint. We built a free curriculum, gave it to any educator who wanted it, and watched it travel: today more than 100,000 students across thousands of classrooms have learned to think, code, and build on DroneBlocks. What began as a single drag-and-drop app is now a full flight path: block coding for a kindergartner, Python and ROS 2 for a high-schooler, autonomous research for a university lab. We even build our own drone now, DEXI, an NDAA-compliant, US-made aircraft running open-source PX4, and one of only three Official PX4 Developer Kits in the world. We're open by default. We just call it the mission, elevating K thru life, one student at a time.
I didn't want to sell schools a drone. I wanted to give every kid a path they could actually climb, and never hit a ceiling we put there.
Dennis Baldwin, Co-Founder
From a school-library prototype to our own open-source drone.
The drones really open up student interest, and there are so many applications for them across our curriculum.
Marisa Vickery, Co-Founder & the teacher whose classroom became DroneBlocks' first · TCEA High Impact Teacher of the Year
Nothing about DroneBlocks is a black box.
One of three Official PX4 Developer Kits
In the world, with ModalAI and Holybro, certified by PX4 + the Dronecode Foundation.
Open code, real traction
Our open-source coding course has 152 GitHub stars; DEXI is 65+ open ROS 2 packages, an open 3D-printable airframe, an open browser configurator.
We contribute upstream
Forks of PX4 and MAVSDK, and DEXI OS built in the open, alongside partners like ARK Electronics and the Dronecode Foundation.
Ten years. A hundred thousand students.
Kindergarten thru Life
Hover Lab
Flight Deck
Vertical Innovation
From one Texas classroom to thousands worldwide, the mission in figures.
Every dot is a school.
DroneBlocks is flying in 48 of the 50 states, plus Washington DC and 41 countries beyond the US. Each dot marks a place where students are coding and flying, from a single elementary classroom to a district running it across every campus.
