A drawer of takeaway chopsticks, and a problem nobody had solved.

Why we started

We grew up as builders, tinkerers and innovators. From robots to air cannons to flamethrowers, we spent our childhoods building all sorts of crazy things.

Growing up in the Singapore education system, we always had access to well funded public schools with great teachers and resources.

After graduating from secondary school, we quickly realised that the current ways STEAM education is being taught were not really developing future problem solvers. Instead, it was producing students who only knew how to copy code and replicate robot designs, a far cry from what STEAM was supposed to develop.

Furthermore, quality STEAM education was not accessible to 90% of the world. How can we expect a school in developing regions, struggling with funding and manpower to integrate hands-on learning and robotics into their curriculum? Or a family worrying about basic necessities afford to send their child to a premium coding class to “get ahead”?

There was a growing divide between the haves and have-nots, and while the world preached STEAM and 21st Century skills as future skills needed, classrooms around the world were still stuck in the past. Everyone knew this was an issue, but no one had the solution to this.

On September 16 2020, we created Stick ’Em to solve that.

Why chopsticks

The idea was deceptively simple. Chopsticks, geometric connectors, and plug and play electronics. The basic building blocks required for students to create prototypes and learn concepts through play.

Tinkering is messy. It’s spontaneous, crazy, creative, and unconventional. We didn’t want kids to be worried about cutting things or damaging expensive parts, so we kept the process of using Stick ’Em as DIY as possible.

Armed with takeaway chopsticks from hawker stalls, a 2nd hand 3D printer and an off-the-shelf Arduino from Taobao, we put together a minimum viable product that had basic controls.

We tested the first kit with friends and family’s kids. It worked pretty well, and we continued to refine it over a few months, adding more connector variations and upgrading the electronics until it got closer and closer to a polished looking STEAM kit.

The first breakthrough

Then, our first breakthrough came. We won our first hackathon, the RHBHacks 2021 organised by Mapletree. We couldn’t believe it.

$7500 cash prize, getting featured on the Straits Times, and we were given a temporary stall at the River Hongbao festival to share about Stick ’Em.

Over the course of 3 days, hundreds of families visited our booth, learning about Stick ’Em and placing pre-orders for our robotics kit. We had 160+ orders, and looking back, it was crazy seeing such overwhelming support for our scrappy, half developed kit that did not even have that many features yet.

Then reality hit

We quickly realised that we now had to produce every single kit manually, with no production line.

We were manually unwrapping and cutting chopsticks one at a time, with a mini bandsaw. Looking back, this was incredibly dangerous and we were lucky to still have all 10 fingers after finishing these 160+ orders.

For the 3D printed connectors, we were running multiple 3D printers at a time in Singapore Polytechnic’s FabLab. We got classmates, friends and family to help with the massive task of sorting and packing, and somehow managed to fulfil every order in time.

Out into the world

As we gained more traction in schools, we also received more grant funding from the National Youth Council, Philip Yeo Initiative, SUTD’s Create4Good, and a few other places. Our team and office expanded steadily to handle the increasing demand.

We started to expand overseas, seeing how Stick ’Em was able to serve all sorts of schools with different backgrounds. From top schools in Singapore to rural schools in Uganda, every student that used Stick ’Em was creating innovative solutions.

Teachers were texting us about how they saw improvements in their students learnings, and were actually excited to come to class to use Stick ’Em.

At the same time throughout these 5 years running Stick ’Em as a fast growing startup, some of us were doing our diplomas, university, and even mandatory military service. It was a constant balance of schooling and Stick ’Em, but both taught us valuable lessons and we always managed to make it work.

The Hult Prize

We decided to join the Hult Prize 2025 for a shot at the $1 Million USD prize to scale up our impact. We were up against 15,000 teams from 133 different countries, all presenting their world changing ideas.

After the online incubator, it got narrowed down to 24 teams, who would spend 1 month at the Ashridge House in the Global Accelerator sharpening their ideas with mentors in real life. In Week 3, we pitched at Google’s London HQ and miraculously made it into the 8 finalist teams.

Although our script was constantly changing, right up till the night before, our mission and real world impact was clear. We just had to tell the Stick ’Em story in an authentic way. We presented in our usual light hearted, youthful manner, and showed everyone how a team of youth had spent almost a quarter of their lives tackling the massive problem of inequality in STEAM education.

We delivered our best pitch ever at the finals. Everyone in the room could feel our passion and commitment to the mission, and one of the judges even went “WE LOVE THEM” during the Q&A.

And then, the announcement came. The winner of the Hult Prize 2025 was Stick ’Em.

What’s next

This message goes out to anyone out there looking to make a change in the world. No matter how crazy your idea might seem, keep pushing for what you believe in.

Because 5 years ago, a group of young, naive teens decided to build chopstick robots, with the crazy idea of making STEAM education accessible to all. Today, they are standing on this global stage with the ability to scale their impact to millions of children out there.