On 25 June 2025 Sheen Academy hosted its first school excursion. Learners from Sans Souci Girls' High School arrived in winter blazers, filled the reception area, and spent the day in a robotics lab that had only been open for three months.

A different kind of audience

Our weekly students opt in. They are here on a Saturday because they want to be, and a class that is merely good still works. A school excursion is not like that. The group arrives together, they did not choose the subject, and within about ten minutes they have decided whether this is interesting or whether it is a day out of school.

That makes an excursion the most useful feedback a robotics programme can get. You find out very quickly which parts of your session are genuinely engaging and which parts you had only convinced yourself were engaging.

What we ran

The day was built around getting hands on hardware as fast as possible, with the explanation arriving after the first thing moved rather than before it. Learners worked through building and programming in small groups, with the instructors circulating rather than presenting from the front.

Group work is not just logistics. In a mixed group, the learner who is quiet in a maths class is often the one who spots why the robot is turning the wrong way — and being the person who solved it, in front of peers, is a different experience from being the person who got the answer right on paper.

Why girls' schools matter to us specifically

South Africa does not have a shortage of girls who are good at this. It has a shortage of girls who have been in a room where doing it felt normal. By the time subject choices are made in Grade 9, a lot of that has already been decided by exposure rather than by ability.

An excursion cannot fix that on its own. What it can do is put a full day of it on the record: an entire group of girls building, programming, debugging and finishing something, together, without anyone treating it as remarkable.

What it started

Sans Souci was the first school group through the door. It was not the last — school visits, holiday camps and on-site workshops have become a standing part of what the academy does, and several of the milestones further along this timeline are the direct descendants of that first excursion.

Schools can arrange an excursion, an on-site workshop or a full programme — talk to us about what would fit your learners, or read about our school services.