Stick ’Em updates
Not a blog with opinions in it. A record of what actually happened: the classrooms, the countries, the competitions and the things that shipped, newest first.
April and May 2026
Brunei
A nationwide tour with the Ministry of Education through the STEP Centre: around a hundred and twenty teachers, about sixty school leaders, a School Leaders Dialogue and a meeting at Ministry headquarters. More than seventy-five schools asked for Stick ’Em afterwards. The post-workshop scores from Brunei teachers are the highest we have recorded in any country.
April 2026
Manila
One News, live in the studio. Our work in the Philippines runs with DOST-SEI and the Philippine Science High School System, with TheChalkboard distributing into public schools.
Early 2026
Philippines
A teacher should be able to search for the topic they are already required to teach and find the lesson. So we mapped a hundred and ten Academy lessons to DepEd’s MATATAG curriculum line by line, rather than asking Filipino teachers to make the link themselves.
September 2025
Tate Modern, London
USD 1 million in seed funding at the global finals, out of fifteen thousand entries from 133 countries. The first Singapore team to win it. The full story, in Kai’s words, is on the About page.
2025
Global
A competition designed so a school can run it in weeks rather than months, with no playfield to build and no specialist equipment to buy. That constraint is the entire format.
May 2025
Indonesia
BPK Penabur trained seven hundred teachers across two sessions for twenty schools. Bogor trained two hundred and twenty-five people from six schools. Several Indonesian schools now run their own regional trainings for the schools around them, which is the only version of this that scales.
2024
Uganda
One teacher at Kigezi High School was trained over a video call. Then nothing, for months. The school had set up its own coding and robotics club and run it alone, and half a year later the teacher wrote to say they had ranked first in the country. Nobody from Stick ’Em was in the room for any of it.
2024
Semporna, Malaysia
With Borneo Komrads, at a school for stateless children built over the water. No proper classrooms, no reliable internet, no trained STEAM teachers. The students used it anyway. The note we took away and still design to: every component has to survive a boat ride.
Instagram is where the classroom photographs go up first, usually the same week. The newsletter is one email a term and no more than that.