China's Educational Robots: The $1.16B Market Teaching a Nation to Code

China's educational robots market is valued around US$244 million in 2025 and projected to reach US$1.16 billion by 2035 — a 16.9% CAGR driven by a very literal policy: the Ministry of Education's 2025-2030 AI education blueprint requires programming education in every compulsory-education school by 2026. The broader programmable-robot market in China is forecast at RMB 15.3 billion in 2026, growing ~19% a year.

The players, ranked

UBTECH is China's largest educational robot maker with roughly a 23% market share — Jimu building-block robots, the uKit/UGOT STEM kits and the Yanshee humanoid for AI classrooms. Notably, its education line is being overtaken internally by humanoids: in H1 2026 humanoids reached 46.5% of revenue, with the education segment still contributing meaningful school-channel sales. Makeblock (~8.5%) is the STEM pioneer, its mBot built on Arduino-compatible hardware with Scratch-based mBlock software — now a staple from Chinese classrooms to the export catalogs of 140+ countries. DJI Education runs the famous RoboMaster university league and the RoboMaster S1 tank-robot kits, feeding China's elite engineering competition pipeline.

The rest of the field

• Robosen (乐森) — programmable transforming robots (official Optimus Prime units) for hobbyists.
• Abilix (能力风暴) and WhalesBot (鲸鱼机器人) — long-standing classroom brands.
• Hiwonder (幻尔) — a top exporter; educational robots ship from ~US$80 to US$1,800.
• Leju (乐聚) — brings humanoids into AI-education campuses.
• Agibot (智元) — a new angle: disassemblable humanoids for vocational training, 5,100 units shipped in 2025.

Why it matters for the industry

Educational robots are China's talent pipeline — the same companies that train kindergarteners on mBots will hire from a generation that learned to code by building robots. And the economics are global: China makes essentially all of the world's STEM robot kits, at price points that undercut Western rivals. When the next wave of Chinese robotics founders emerges in the late 2030s, many will trace their first line of code to one of these classrooms.

What to watch

• AI-humanoid classrooms — Yanshee-style robots moving from demos to national AI-education curricula.
• Vocational pivot — Agibot's disassemblable training humanoids signal where the money is moving.
• Export moat — Chinese kits remain the value benchmark for the global STEM market.