On 6 September 2025 Sheen brought sheenbot∞ to learners attending the EdenX Future Ready Festival in George, in the Garden Route.

Four hours from the lab

Almost everything else on this timeline happened within an hour of our building. George is not. Getting there means loading the kit, driving across the province, and rebuilding the stand in a hall you have never seen — and it is worth every hour of it.

The exhibition circuit in South Africa has a gravitational pull towards the metros. If you only exhibit where it is convenient, you systematically reach the learners who already have the most options and miss the ones for whom a single exposure makes the biggest difference. Learners in the Garden Route are not less interested in robotics. They are offered it less often.

What was on the table

School groups worked directly with the boards: sheenbot∞ controllers in hand, robot builds running on the table, and tablets showing the programming that drove them. High-school learners in blazers, three deep around the stand, most of them holding a board rather than looking at one.

Handing over the hardware sounds like a small thing. It is the single biggest difference between a stand people remember and a stand people walk past. A board in your hand becomes a question — what does this port do, how does it know that, can it do X — and a question is the beginning of everything else.

The question that comes after "how does it work"

At a festival themed around being future-ready, the second question is always about jobs. Learners want to know whether this is a career and whether it is a career here.

It is a fair question and it deserves a concrete answer rather than encouragement. Robotics, automation, agritech and IoT are not abstractions in the Western Cape — there is agriculture running sensors, logistics running automation, and a growing technology sector that hires locally. Being able to point at that, specifically, is more useful to a Grade 10 learner than any amount of inspiration.

What we took home

Regional events are harder to run and produce better conversations. The learners at EdenX had not seen five other robotics stands that month, so they arrived without the polite boredom that metro exhibitions can produce, and they stayed longer.

It is a large part of why we have kept going out to regional events since — including the Grade 9 STEM bootcamp in Ceres two months later.

Running an event outside the metro? Ask us about bringing a stand or a workshop.