On 2 November 2025 Sheen took part in a Grade 9 STEM bootcamp in Ceres, hosting the coding and robotics workshops alongside the Western Cape Education Department's curriculum team.

Grade 9 is the year that matters

Of all the school years to reach, Grade 9 is the one with the most leverage — because it is the year South African learners choose their FET-phase subjects, and those choices are effectively irreversible.

A learner who does not take mathematics has closed most engineering, computing and science routes before turning sixteen. Very often that decision is made without ever having seen what the closed door leads to. It is not a decision about ability; it is a decision made in the absence of information.

A bootcamp cannot fix a curriculum. What it can do is make sure that when a learner in Ceres makes that choice, they are choosing with something concrete in mind rather than a blank.

What we ran

Our part was the coding and robotics workshops: hands-on sessions where learners build, program, break and fix something inside a single sitting. Fast entry, visible results, and no requirement to have done any of it before.

The bootcamp format helps here. Over consecutive sessions a learner gets past the novelty and into the part where things stop working — which is where the real learning is, and where a one-hour demonstration never reaches.

Why Ceres, and why it took a day's driving

Ceres sits in the Witzenberg municipality, in the Cape Winelands. It is farming country, several hours from Cape Town, and a long way off the route most technology providers take.

That is precisely the argument for going. Learners in the metro can encounter robotics at a science centre, a mall exhibition, a school club or a holiday camp. Learners in a rural town may encounter it once, if at all — which makes a single well-run bootcamp worth disproportionately more there than the same day spent in the city.

It is also worth saying plainly: the technology sector these learners are being introduced to is not somewhere else. Agriculture in the Western Cape runs sensors, irrigation control and increasingly automation. The smart farming work we do elsewhere on this timeline is not a metaphor for these learners — it is the industry on their doorstep.

Working with the WCED

Our bootcamps in collaboration with the Western Cape Education Department are the part of our outreach with the widest reach, and they run on a simple division of labour: the department knows which learners need this and can convene them; we bring the kit, the curriculum and the people who can run a busy room.

See more about our bootcamps and workshops, or read about what we run in schools.