On 1 July 2025 Sheen delivered its first sheenbot workshop at Techno Buzz. Everything up to that point had happened on our own equipment, in our own room, with our own network. This was the first time the kit had to work somewhere else.

The real test is never the robot

Anyone who has run a technology workshop in a school lab knows the actual difficulty is rarely the technology you brought. It is the environment you arrive in: machines of different ages, locked-down user accounts, a projector that needs a specific adapter, a network that filters things, and thirty minutes to get all of it working before the first learner sits down.

Designing for that is a discipline. It shaped decisions that are still in the product — that the tooling should run in a browser rather than needing an install, that a board should be recognised without a driver hunt, and that the first success of the session should happen within minutes rather than after setup.

What the room built

The workshop paired the sheenbot board with the smart home kit: laser-cut wooden houses on the desks, sensors wired into them, and a block-programming canvas on screen. Participants worked through making a house respond to its surroundings — light, movement, temperature — which is a project with an obvious goal and a very visible failure mode.

The group was mixed in age and background, which we did not treat as a problem to be managed. Older participants moved into the code faster; younger ones spent longer on the build. Both got to a working house, which is the only outcome that matters at the end of a first session.

Why we kept doing this

Running a workshop on someone else's site is more work than running it at home, and we have done it a great deal since — school holiday camps, science weeks, expos, bootcamps and teacher training days, many of which appear further down this timeline.

The reason is simple: the learners who most need this are not the ones who can get to Century City on a Saturday morning. If the programme only works in our own building, it does not really work.

We run workshops at schools, holiday clubs and community venues across the Western Cape. See our workshop programmes or ask about hosting one.