On 19 November 2025 Sheen delivered WhalesBot robotics courses at Bellville Preparatory School — a classroom packed with primary learners sitting shoulder to shoulder on the floor, and a build on the screen.

Start early, and the fear never forms

Most of the anxiety adults have about coding and robotics is learned somewhere between primary and high school. Ask a Grade 2 class who wants to build a robot and every hand goes up. Ask a Grade 10 class and you get a much smaller, much more self-conscious response, mostly from learners who have already decided they are "a technology person".

Nothing happened to their ability in between. What happened is that the subject acquired a reputation for being hard, mathematical and for other people.

Working with primary schools is the cheapest available fix. A child who spent Grade 4 building machines never develops the idea that this is not for them, because by the time anyone suggests it, they already have evidence to the contrary.

What a primary robotics lesson actually is

The mechanism on screen that day was a merry-go-round: a structure that has to be built correctly, a motor that has to be driven, and a result that either spins properly or does not.

That single project quietly contains most of a Grade 4 to 6 science and technology curriculum — structures and stability, gears and rotation, energy transfer, sequencing and cause-and-effect. The learners experience it as a fairground ride they made work. The teacher can map it straight onto the syllabus.

WhalesBot kits suit this age group specifically. The build is chunky enough for small hands, robust enough for a room of thirty, and the programming layer scales from icon-based control up to block coding as the learners grow.

Whole classes, not clubs

An after-school robotics club reaches the children whose parents already sought it out. A course delivered to a whole class reaches everyone — including the learner who would never have signed up and turns out to be the best in the room at it.

Reaching that particular child is most of the reason we do this work in schools rather than only in our own building.

Part of a growing group of partner schools

Bellville Preparatory joined a run of school programmes started a month earlier with Forest Village Leadership Academy and TDK Edventures, and continuing the following year with Laerskool Paul Greyling.

Primary schools can run our courses as part of the timetable, with teacher training included. See school services or get in touch.