A Spark in Singapore’s Classrooms
In 2020, at just 17 years old, Chong Ing Kai observed children trapped in underprivileged classrooms having difficulty focusing with experiential STEM kits. The robotics sets are just too pricey. Teachers had no support. Learning by doing was frequently a project at the end of the year — not something included in the daily curriculum.
Together with his co-founders — Huh Dam (often referred to as Adam), Tew Jing An, and Chong Kai Jie — they asked: What if making robots could cost one-tenth of today’s kits, using simple parts and still teach STEAM concepts for real? That question ignited the creation of Stick’ Em, a Singapore-based edTech startup with a mission to bring affordable, hands-on STEAM education to every school.
The Founding Quartet: Who They Are
- Chong Ing Kai (Co-Founder & CEO): Graduated from Singapore Polytechnic with a diploma in Engineering with Business; as a teenager, he had been building small machines and participating in robotics competitions. Media profiles highlight his early age of founding (17) and his passion for democratising hands-on learning.
- Huh Dam (Adam) (Co-Founder & Executive Director): Alumni of the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD), Engineering Product Development background; awarded Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia laureate. He brought product development discipline and a design-engineering mindset to the team.
- Tew Jing An (Co-Founder): A student at the National University of Singapore (NUS) School of Computing, providing software, platform, and curriculum support to the hardware kits.
- Chong Kai Jie (Co-Founder & Product Designer): Worked alongside the team on hardware design, 3D-printed parts, kit optimisation and teacher-facing modules.
Together they combined youthful energy, design thinking, engineering skills and educational ambition — forming the core of Stick’ Em’s founding team.
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Prototyping the Big Idea: From Chopsticks to Kits
The team’s early prototype work was raw and hands-on. Using 3D-printers (the founders even ran them overnight in dorm rooms), inexpensive materials, and thousands of hours of iteration, they developed a modular kit built around widely available chopsticks and geometric connectors. Teachers could use the kit to build robots, machines, catapults, vehicles, and teach mathematics, physics, engineering, and coding in engaging ways.
Their hardware-plus-software offering included:
- A physical kit of chopsticks, wheels, connectors, motors and plug-and-play electronics.
- A web-based “Stick’ Em Academy” with self-guided lessons for teachers, enabling both structured curricula and open-ended tinkering.
- Workshops and demo classes to test how students build, learn, iterate and reflect — enabling the team to iterate further on kit design, instructions and teacher support.
The Launch & Early Traction
In 2021, the company struck its first significant public milestone: the startup entered the Hult Prize Global Finals competition and by September 2025 was named Global Champion, earning US $1 million in seed funding to accelerate global rollout.
Before that, Stick’ Em had already reached multiple markets: by 2025, it had served more than 12,000 students, 1,200+ teachers and ~100 schools across 11 countries. Their goal: reach 860,000 students by 2030.
Singapore headquartered, the team used local pilot schools and maker-spaces to iterate and demonstrate viability — for example, selling initial large orders during a hackathon at Gardens by the Bay, then scrambling to fulfil them via 3D-printing in dorms.
Scaling Up: Challenges & Growth
As Stick’ Em scales, the founders faced several key challenges:
- Production & Supply Chain: Moving from small 3D-printed batches to truly scalable manufacturing of kits that meet cost, quality and distribution demands spanning across countries.
- Market Acceptance & Curriculum Integration: Convincing schools (especially in resource-limited settings) to adopt the kits as part of the curriculum rather than as a one-off activity. Teachers needed training, students needed meaningful outcomes.
- Global Expansion & Local Context: Adapting the product for diverse geographies (Indonesia, Vietnam, Uganda, Malaysia) where infrastructure, teacher training and budgets differ widely.
- Financial Sustainability & Social Impact: While being affordable (the kits cost about one-tenth the cost of traditional robotics kits) gives substantial social value, the founders must drive scale-economics, revenue models, training, support and recurring usage.
Impact and Why This Story Matters
Stick’ Em’s story is about more than hardware and startup success. It stands for:
- Democratizing STEAM education: By drastically lowering cost (using chopsticks and 3D-printed parts) and simplifying curriculum integration, the team opens hands-on, problem-solving education to many more students.
- Youth-led innovation: The founding team were students when they started — showing how young founders can meaningfully tackle entrenched education problems.
- Scalable social impact: By 2025, serving thousands of students and teachers across multiple countries, they’re proving that social-enterprise education startups can scale internationally.
- Hybrid skill-set leadership: Their team combines engineering, software, pedagogy and design — a modern blueprint for education-tech ventures.
The Road Ahead
With the Hult Prize seed funding in hand, the next phase for Stick’ Em includes:
- Building teacher-trainer networks across Southeast Asia and beyond, empowering “super-teachers” who can cascade training and adoption in local regions.
- Investing in manufacturing and supply chain to deliver kits at scale into hard-to-reach regions (e.g., rural parts of Uganda) and building localised lesson materials.
- Expanding the product suite: from basic robotics kits into more advanced modules (AI, sensors, environmental science) while keeping cost low.
- Strengthening measurement of educational outcomes: showing impact on student engagement, STEM performance, teacher efficacy, and long-term learning.
- Deepening partnerships with ministries of education, NGOs, and foundations to integrate Stick’ Em into formal educational programs.
