At Stick ‘Em, chopsticks are rewiring STEAM education

The country count on Stick ‘Em’s various pages doesn’t quite agree with itself. Depending on where you look, the Singapore education start-up is in 13 to 18 countries — although its 22-year-old chief executive will tell you that the figure is mostly marketing.

“We’re pretty loose with the term ‘active market’,” Chong Ing Kai says with candour. “It’s mostly marketing speak.” Six countries, he reckons, are at a decent scale. Four or five are pilot deployments. The rest are exploratory.

Last September, Stick ‘Em won the US$1 million (approx. $1.28 million) Hult Prize — often called the Nobel Prize for students — at the global finals at London’s Tate Modern, the first Singapore team to do so. Chong, who started the company at 17, is unbothered by the gap.

What matters to him is not the country count, but how Science, Technology, Engineering, the Arts, and Mathematics (STEAM) gets taught inside each classroom Stick ‘Em reaches.

The chopstick pitch

Stick ‘Em sells $100 kits of chopsticks, connectors, motors, and sensors, with an online platform for teachers. His question is not how to put more kits in more children’s hands but what happens after the kit arrives. A traditional STEAM vendor, he says, turns up with a slide deck, walks the class through a fixed build, and packs up. Students leave with an identical robot. And the next class begins the same way.

The Stick ‘Em kit works differently: It ships with a problem brief, not a build sequence, handing children a real-world challenge — disaster relief, assistive technology for people with disabilities, or the design of bomb disposal robots — and asking them to address it.

“A lot of Singaporean students don’t realise that in countries like Laos and Vietnam, there is unexploded ordnance that villagers are constantly getting injured and disabled by,” Chong says. “As they learn about these topics and build solutions for them, they expand their worldview.”

When the kit works, the results can surprise even the start-up. At the Tak Takut Kids Club in Boon Lay, volunteers warned Chong that the children would be hard to teach: impatient, prone to tantrums and quick to give up. But when robots failed to work, the children stayed, tracing wires to find out what had gone wrong.

Sessions like that one depended on Chong or his trainers being in the room. For the company’s first three years, that meant student workshops: a trainer would visit a school, take a class through a build and move on.

“If I train a teacher, they can go on to train classes and classes of students,” Chong says. “Compared to me sending my trainers down to teach one class of students, and that’s where the impact ends.”

The teacher-training pivot began two or three years ago, and the evidence so far is mostly Southeast Asian. This year, Chong spent eight days in Brunei training school leaders, teachers, students and Ministry of Education officials, covering 140 schools’ worth of people. In Indonesia, he trained 700 teachers in a single day.

In Singapore, where Stick ‘Em has been at it longest, the kit is in around 60 public schools, a fifth of the system. Stick ‘Em has now reached 35,000 students and 3,800 teachers since 2020. While Chong still trains teachers personally, a certified-trainer programme for publishing houses and local distributors is next.

Reaching those numbers rests on an economic logic. The $100 is a per-set price: Three or four students share a set, and a single set rotates across classrooms, cutting the cost per child considerably. Stick ‘Em also does not run a rich-schools-subsidise-poor-schools model.

“The revenue from rich schools will always be dwarfed by the sheer number of poor schools,” Chong says. “The subsidy model doesn’t work.” In his main government-facing markets — the Philippines, Indonesia, and Vietnam — cost is not the binding constraint. The harder barriers, he says, are school calendars, bureaucracy and low government confidence in their own teachers. 

In the poorest contexts, like Uganda and the Sabah floating villages, kits are donated or funded by partners such as Google. Long-term, Chong wants direct government sales; corporate social responsibility partners and non-profit organisations, he acknowledges, are workable but smaller in scale.

Less selling than lobbying

The Hult Prize, then, is fuel for an argument the company is still making to governments. The money goes roughly half to production, a quarter to sales and marketing, and a quarter to research and development. The 2026 plan is to go deeper in five markets where Stick ‘Em has traction: Singapore, Indonesia, Brunei, Hong Kong, and Vietnam.

The work ahead, as Chong sees it, looks less like selling than lobbying. “It is almost something similar to being a government lobby,” he says, “where we have to go government to government and show them that STEAM education is something that is possible for their public schools.” 

Governments are slow, he notes, and tight on funding. And stubborn. He concedes that he and his co-founders lack experience in this area and are leaning on advisors and mentors.

“An indefinite gap year”

Chong came out of National Service in November last year and is now full-time on Stick ‘Em. University is not on the horizon. “I like to joke that I’m on an indefinite gap year,” he says, “but knowing me, I’m probably not going to go to university.”

The arc has been steep. Early kits were packed in the founders’ homes, and 3D printers were running around the clock. Stick ‘Em’s first commercial break came in 2021, at the River Hongbao festival at Gardens by the Bay, where they were unexpectedly hit with 150 orders.

The hardest part of the past five years, he says, has not been the product or the pitch. “We started this company when we were 17-year-olds, really young, fresh, and honestly a bit naive,” he says. “I didn’t realise how much of the start-up journey is actually the founder journey itself.”

What he is working toward is a Stick ‘Em that runs without him in the room — kits unboxed in classrooms he has never seen, taught by Stick ‘Em-trained teachers he has never met.

The model he goes back to is the BBC’s micro:bit, which became a default for school-level coding a decade ago. “Our main, broad and big vision is to become the default for STEAM education across the world. If we focus only on private schools, which make up about 10 to 20 per cent of the population, we will just be another fancy product that some schools will consider when they have the funding, rather than a truly generationally impactful company that can transform STEAM education.”

“We never, ever, ever want to become a company that focuses so much on profit that we forget why we started: to democratise access to STEAM education.”

Photography: Isabelle Seah
Art direction: Ashruddin Sani
Grooming: Angel Gwee