Tallinn is now teaching children as young as 8 to fly drones, and every seat is taken before the first school group walks in. The city opened its first drone classroom on September 18 at the Energy Discovery Center, the capital’s science museum, and from October any Tallinn school can book the course for students aged 8 to 16. Deputy Mayor Kristjan Järvan, who launched the project at the start of the summer, told Le Monde the program is already fully booked and the city’s problem is now finding room for the children it has turned away.

The city’s own announcement of the opening talked about engineering, programming, electronics and future careers. Järvan, asked by Le Monde why he built it, gave a different answer: the defense of a country with Russia next door.

Tallinn Sold the Classroom as STEM and Its Creator Calls It Defense Prep

Estonia has required every student entering upper secondary school to take a 35-hour national defense course since autumn 2023, and Järvan told Le Monde the children’s drone classroom feeds it. Students fly civilian drones only. “We know we have a slightly crazy neighbor, but we are getting ready,” he said.

The quotes the city released at the September 18 opening covered engineering and careers and never mentioned defense. The national course Järvan is pointing at covers military history, weapon handling and first aid in its theory block. A second 35-hour practical block, run by the Defence League, stays voluntary. Tallinn’s classroom sits below both, aimed at primary and middle schoolers, and Järvan’s point was what those children can do with the skill once they are adults.

The idea itself came from Ukraine. Järvan said he visited Ukrainian cities where children are taught civil defense with 3D-printed replicas of mines so they learn what not to pick up, and concluded that protecting citizens during a military crisis is a civil authority’s job. Estonia is not the first Baltic state to reach that conclusion: DroneXL reported on Lithuania’s program in Lithuanian Kids Learn to Fly Drones Near Russian Border, where the defense ministry put a 22,000-person training target and a €3.3 million budget on paper when it announced the program in August 2025. Tallinn has published neither a headcount nor a budget beyond the fact that the city paid for the room.

Järvan was Estonia’s minister for entrepreneurship and information technology in 2022 and 2023 before taking the transport portfolio at Tallinn City Hall. Estonia has 1.4 million people, a number DroneXL has flagged before when covering the country’s drone warfare push in 2024.

Students Fly 30 Simulator Hours Before They Touch a Real Drone

Children in Tallinn’s course fly computer simulators for 30 hours before the Energy Discovery Center lets them pilot a real drone, instructor Richard Muuga told Le Monde. After-school clubs for ages 8 to 11 and 12 to 16 have run since September 8, built with the HobiZone club since March.

Muuga, 22, opens each session with a plush duck, because every child already knows how a duck flies, then takes apart one of the round drone-soccer quads the museum also flies to show what moves when the sticks do. The 30-hour simulator rule exists, in his words, “to avoid too many crashes.” Public drone-soccer sessions on the city’s own pitch run daily at noon, 2, 4 and 6 p.m. and are open to adults too, according to the ERR report on the opening.

The three boys Le Monde watched, two 9-year-olds and a 15-year-old, did not talk about war. One wants to shoot films, the 15-year-old already flies at home and wants to race. Asked whether he could see himself operating military drones as an adult, he answered that defending the country is important. The grandmother collecting one of the 9-year-olds, a member of Estonia’s Russian-speaking minority who introduced herself as Estonian, called drones a profession of the future and then added that if the country were attacked, her grandson might be useful.

DroneXL’s Take

Tallinn has the order of operations right, and Russia has it backwards. Moscow put a drone-operation textbook into the federal curriculum for 8th and 9th graders with a stated goal of one million operators by 2030, a military quota dressed as a school subject. Tallinn built a science-museum classroom where a 22-year-old explains lift with a stuffed duck, let the kids fill it on their own, and only when a French correspondent asked did the deputy mayor say the quiet part. The children get drone soccer and simulator time. The state gets a generation that knows how a quadcopter fails before it ever needs them to. Teaching 9-year-olds anything with a war in the next sentence is uncomfortable, and the grandmother’s “that would be a good thing” is the sentence in this story I keep coming back to. My read is that Estonia’s version is still the honest one: a civilian program that admits why it exists beats a defense program pretending to be a hobby. American school districts are running drone soccer leagues and STEM flight classes right now with no such framing, and that is fine for a country with two oceans. Estonia shares a land border with Russia. Fully booked is the only correct enrollment number.

Sources: Le Monde, ERR, Estonian Defence Resources Agency

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