On 21 October 2025 Sheen delivered robotics kits and training to Forest Village Leadership Academy — our first partnership school.

Why the kits are the easy part

Donating equipment to a school is straightforward, popular, and on its own almost useless. Robotics kits that arrive without training reliably end up in a storeroom, and everyone involved in this field has seen it happen.

The reason is not indifference. It is that a teacher handed unfamiliar hardware and an existing full timetable is being asked to absorb a new subject in their own time, with no one to ask when something does not work. Most will try. Most will stop.

So the handover at Forest Village was built around the teachers, not the boxes.

What actually gets handed over

A partnership starts with a training session for the staff who will teach it, and it comes with a support structure designed for the way teachers really work:

• Manuals and activity booklets — printed, lesson-shaped material, so preparation does not mean inventing a lesson from a component list.
• Online tutorials and video — for the Sunday evening when a teacher wants to check the build before Monday.
• A peer community — a WhatsApp and Teams group where a teacher can post a photo of something that will not work and get an answer from someone who has hit it before.

That last one is the least impressive and the most used. Nobody wants to raise a support ticket about a wire. Everybody will send a photo to a group.

Teachers first, learners next

There is a version of this work where an outside provider comes in, runs a brilliant session, and leaves. The learners have a good day, and nothing about the school changes.

The version that lasts is slower: train the teachers, give them material they can actually run, stay reachable, and let the programme belong to the school. It is less visible, and it is the only approach that is still running in year three.

The first of several

Forest Village was the first school to take this on. Others followed — the TDK Edventures partnership four days later, Bellville Preparatory School in November, and Laerskool Paul Greyling the following year, which added smart farming to the mix.

Schools interested in a coding and robotics programme with training and support included can read about our school services or contact us directly.