On 21 August 2025 Sheen took part in a workshop convened to explore potential international collaboration across Cape Town's technology and education ecosystem.

The unglamorous milestones

Most entries in this timeline are photogenic: children building robots, a humanoid walking on a table, a partnership agreement being signed. This one is a group of adults standing in an atrium having a conversation, and we have included it deliberately.

Almost everything that later becomes a programme starts in a room like that. A school partnership, a curriculum pilot, a supply arrangement, a joint bid — none of them begin with a contract. They begin with someone describing a problem specifically enough that a stranger recognises it.

What these conversations are actually for

International collaboration in education technology is easy to talk about badly. The pattern that does not work is well known: a solution designed for one context is exported to another, the assumptions travel with it invisibly, and the pilot quietly ends when the funding does.

The conversations worth having are the ones that go the other way — starting from what is true in the room you are standing in:

• What is the actual constraint? In many South African classrooms it is not enthusiasm or ability. It is device access, bandwidth, teacher time and the cost of replacing a broken kit.
• Who is already doing this? Duplicating an existing local effort with foreign funding is a common and expensive mistake.
• What survives after the pilot? A programme that depends on visiting expertise is a demonstration, not a capability.
• Who is accountable when it breaks? Support and repair are the part of edtech that nobody photographs and everybody needs.

Where we sit in an ecosystem

Sheen builds hardware, writes curriculum and runs classrooms. That combination is unusual and it is the reason we find these rooms useful: we can say concretely what does and does not work in a Western Cape school lab on a Tuesday morning, because we were in one.

What we look for in return is the reach we do not have — departments, universities, research facilities and funders who can put a working programme in front of far more learners than a company our size can reach alone.

If you are building something in this space and want a partner who works at the classroom end of it, get in touch.