SA EdTech Week 2025, held in late October, put one question at the centre of the conversation: what does it actually take to make education technology work in schools that do not have reliable power, a stable connection, or a full-time IT person on staff. The honest answer that came out of the week was less about apps and more about groundwork. Readiness in an under-resourced school is an infrastructure problem, a teacher-capacity problem, and a durability problem long before it is a software problem.

What follows is commentary on what the gathering emphasised and what schools, districts and delivery teams can do with it. It is deliberately vendor-neutral. If your budget only stretches to one thing this term, the takeaways below are meant to help you spend it where it holds up.

What SA EdTech Week 2025 focused on

The framing this year was EdTech readiness in under-resourced contexts. Instead of showcasing the newest platform, the week kept returning to the conditions a tool has to survive: intermittent power, thin or capped bandwidth, shared devices, and teachers who are learning the subject one lesson ahead of their class. That is the reality of a large share of South African schools, and it is the environment against which any coding-and-robotics rollout should be tested. A tool that shines in a well-connected private school and collapses in a rural one has not been proven at all.

The through-line was simple. Buy for the school you have, not the demo you saw. The rest of the takeaways follow from that.

Infrastructure comes before software

The strongest theme was infrastructure-first design. Three constraints matter most, and they map cleanly onto how you should evaluate anything you are about to bring in.

Power. Even as load shedding has eased, planned and unplanned outages are still part of the school day. Anything that dies the moment the lights go out is a liability. Favour devices that run on batteries or can be charged in a window and then used offline, and prefer kits that hold a charge across a full lesson. A robotics board that keeps working through an outage keeps the lesson going; a cloud tool that needs a live login does not.

Connectivity. Treat the internet as a sometimes-thing. Offline-first tools, content you can cache or download once, and activities that do not stream video in real time are worth far more than feature lists. If a platform is unusable on a capped mobile connection, it is unusable for many of the schools that need it most.

Durability. Kits get dropped, shared between classes, and stored in cupboards that are not climate-controlled. Physical robustness, cheap and available spare parts, and simple repairs beat delicate hardware every time. Budget from the start for consumables and replacements rather than assuming a class set will arrive intact at the end of the year.

Teacher support beats tool count

The second theme was just as consistent: teacher support over tool count. Schools that succeed do not have more gadgets; they have teachers who feel confident using the few they own. Piling up three half-learned platforms produces less than one tool a teacher genuinely commands.

That shifts where the money should go. A meaningful slice of any EdTech budget belongs to training, planning time, lesson materials aligned to the CAPS coding-and-robotics curriculum, and a person a teacher can call when something breaks. Hardware is the easy part of a rollout. The support around it is what decides whether the boxes get opened in March and are still in weekly use in October. Our own academy was built around the same principle: start with a teacher who can run the lesson, then add tools they can actually maintain.

A readiness checklist for under-resourced schools

Before you sign off on any EdTech purchase this term, walk through the following. If a tool fails more than a couple of these, it is not ready for the school you actually have.

• Power test: does it still work during an outage, on battery, with no wall socket for a full lesson.
• Offline test: can a teacher run a complete lesson with the internet switched off, and sync later if needed.
• Durability test: can it survive a drop, a shared cupboard, and a term of daily handling; are spares cheap and locally available.
• Teacher test: can a non-specialist teacher deliver the first lesson after a short session, with printed or offline guidance to fall back on.
• Repair test: when one unit breaks, can the school fix or replace it without shipping it away for weeks.
• Curriculum test: does it map to what learners are actually assessed on, not just to an impressive demo.
• Total-cost test: have you budgeted for spares, consumables and training, not just the sticker price of the kits.

Where robotics kits fit the readiness picture

Physical coding-and-robotics kits happen to suit these constraints well, which is part of why they keep coming up in this conversation. A board that runs on its own once programmed does not depend on a live connection during the lesson, and a well-made kit tolerates the rough handling of a shared classroom. That is the bar the sheenbot infinity board was designed to clear, and it is the same bar you should hold any alternative to.

If you are equipping a class, think in terms of a class set with a margin for spares rather than exactly one kit per learner, and plan for a few replacements over the year. You can see how we package kits and spares in the store, but the more important move is to try before you scale. A single trial lesson tells you more about readiness than any brochure, which is why a low-commitment trial or a school-holiday workshop is a sensible first step before committing a term's budget.

Takeaway

The lasting message from SA EdTech Week 2025 is that readiness is earned in the boring details. Design for power, connectivity and durability first. Spend on teachers and support before you spend on the next tool. Test everything against the school you actually run, not the one in the demo. Do that, and the technology you bring in has a real chance of still being used when the year is over. For more practical notes from the sheen team, keep an eye on the newsroom.