Author | Li Lizhi Guo Yumeng
With the comprehensive upgrading of the national education reform and the rapid change of the employment structure, quality education has ushered in a new era of rapid development, and STEAM education, which originated in the United States, has gradually developed and risen in China. On February 6, 2017, the Ministry of Education issued the "Standards for the Science Curriculum of Compulsory Primary Schools" and said that it advocates interdisciplinary learning methods. STEAM, namely Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics, is a program-based, problem-solving-oriented approach to curriculum organization.
STEAM education and makers are both different and integrated. Among them, the more representative 4 sub-tracks are programming (software-only part), hardware (+ programming), 3D printing and robotics. Prior to this, 36Kr had introduced a variety of programming and maker products, of which Makeblock recently received a new round of financing, and it was also reported that Lego had signed a 50 million yuan cooperation plan with the Ministry of Education to open Lego labs across the country. Coupled with the maker-related policies introduced by various places, Fan Ruifeng, the founder of Lezhi Education, believes that the domestic demand in this regard will become more and more large.
Before makers entered the K12 field, many colleges and universities already had a demand for similar content, so what Lezhi Education hopes to do is a "water and electricity network" in the field of maker education, providing comprehensive solutions for public schools and institutions, and providing a cloud learning platform for online users.
Fan Ruifeng believes that external institutions and public schools do not have an advantage in independent research and development of content. This is reflected in the fact that the curriculum content of the institution is mostly imported from abroad, and the institution lacks its own teaching system; while the public school is far from this market, the teacher may have the ability to teach the knowledge well, but it is difficult to grasp the entire curriculum system (such as clearly knowing the difference between Arduino and Raspberry Pi). In the final analysis, the curriculum system can only be designed and developed by people with a high degree of standing on a certain foundation.
The core members of Lezhi Robot are from Peking University, Tsinghua and other famous schools, and the founder Fan Ruifeng graduated from Peking University and is also a teacher at Peking University. Relying on the academic background of Peking University, the advantage of Lezhi Robot is "industry-education integration", and the product fully understands the market demand before research and development. At present, Lezhi has organized front-line experts from universities, primary and secondary schools to do content research and development.
At the product level, Lezhi provides its own Kenblock maker kit to the B-side, which includes more than 60 circuit modules (including sensors, actuators, etc.) and more than 300 technical structural parts. In addition, Lezhi also offers its own specialty product, the water robot Kenfish, hoping to make it a "Lego in the water".
Some student works
However, in order to let more people see and even use the product, Lezhi independently developed the "Nibble Radish" online platform. This platform provides users with intelligent hardware and programming learning cloud services, while for primary and secondary schools, universities and teacher training Lezhi also provides a series of complete solutions, the current platform has 100,000 registered users, most of them are hardware + programming enthusiasts. The deeper application of "nibbling turnips" lies in providing software services to hardware companies and charging service fees every year, so many hardware manufacturers may become users of "nibbling radishes" in the future.
In addition, Lezhi also regularly holds related competitions, such as the International Aquatic Robot Competition, the International Robot Maker Competition, and the Study Tour Expansion, gradually building a complete STEAM education ecosystem including "products, platforms, courses, and competitions".
From the perspective of model, Lezhi mainly adopts the B2B2C approach, that is, around the Kenblock series of products, it penetrates into the B-end with the curriculum system, competition program, and teacher training, and finally serves the C-end users. In terms of operation, it is mainly expanded and promoted by agent channels across the country, and key universities are docked by team resources, which currently covers more than 100 domestic universities, primary and secondary schools, as well as Taiwan, South Korea, the United States, the United Kingdom and other colleges.
In order to cooperate with the STEAM teaching system, Lezhi has jointly developed and published multi-level curriculum textbooks with Peking University, Tsinghua University, MIT and other famous universities. In addition, based on years of experience, Lezhi has held 10 robot maker competitions. From the perspective of revenue, the early revenue of Lezhi mainly comes from the output of STEAM education products and overall solutions, through high-end training to promote RoboCom programs and course systems, the future will gradually consider the use of a sharing fee model in the output of course content, the company has basically achieved breakeven last year.
When it comes to STEAM education, the current market can be divided into two models: to B and to C. The success or failure of The To B business mainly depends on channel acquisition and channel control capabilities, such as Shanghai STEM Cloud Center, etc., and the success or failure of To C business mainly depends on the quality of courses and business promotion capabilities, such as Loeb Education.
In terms of team, the core members of Lezhi are from Peking University, Tsinghua University and other famous universities, and the overall size of the team is now more than 60 people. Founder Fan Ruifeng, graduated from Peking University and served as a teacher at Peking University, as a continuous successful entrepreneur, is also the founder of the International Robot Maker Alliance and Competition; co-founder Xiao Jing, MBA of Wuhan University, has participated in the education industry transformation education layout of two listed companies, with 8 years of experience in the education information industry; co-founder Luo Min, master of Beijing Polytechnic, was a senior user engineer of Baidu education products; co-founder Li Shinian, the dark horse of Baidu hackathon competition, has rich experience in software and hardware development.
Lezhi Robot has received 10 million yuan of angel round investment from Lihe Starry Sky and Maker Angel, and is currently seeking Pre-A round financing, planning to go to the new third board this year.