Stick 'Em: The Chopstick STEM Kit in 200 Schools

Overview

Most educational technology arrives as a screen. Stick 'Em, a STEAM education kit developed in Singapore, arrives as a box of wooden chopsticks, geometric connectors and plug-and-play electronics.

The premise is that physical computing should be buildable from materials that cost almost nothing. Students assemble structures from chopsticks and connectors, attach electronic components, and program the result through block-based coding and a web interface that controls their creations over Bluetooth.

According to company-reported figures, the kit is used in over 50 schools in Singapore and around 200 worldwide, reaching more than 18,000 students and over 2,000 teachers across 15 countries. The venture is associated with the Hult Prize 2025.

The interesting question is not whether a startup grew, but why a chopstick outperforms a purpose-built component in a classroom — and the answer says something useful about why most educational hardware fails.

Why Chopsticks

The choice of a wooden chopstick as a structural element is the product's central idea rather than a quirky origin story.

A chopstick is straight, rigid, uniform in diameter, available essentially everywhere, and costs a fraction of a cent. It requires no manufacturing, no supply chain specific to the product, and no replacement parts ordered from a vendor. A school that runs out can buy more from a supermarket.

That last property is the one that matters for classroom technology. Kits built from proprietary components degrade steadily as pieces are lost or broken, and eventually stop being usable because reordering is slow or the product line has been discontinued. A structural element sourced from any shop does not have that failure mode.

What's Actually in the Kit

The system combines three elements: geometric connectors, wooden chopsticks and plug-and-play electronics.

The connectors are the engineered part. They join chopsticks at defined angles, which is what turns loose sticks into triangles, frames and mechanisms with predictable geometry. Students can build a wide range of structures from a small number of connector types.

The electronics attach to those structures without soldering or wiring diagrams. Plug-and-play components remove the failure mode that ends most classroom electronics lessons — a circuit that does not work for reasons neither the student nor the teacher can diagnose within a lesson period.

Block Programming and Bluetooth Control

The software layer uses block-based programming, the visual approach familiar from Scratch, where students assemble commands by dragging blocks rather than typing syntax.

That choice removes a specific barrier. In text-based programming, a missing bracket or misspelled keyword produces an error unrelated to the student's actual idea, and the lesson becomes about syntax rather than logic. Block programming makes structurally invalid programs impossible to assemble.

A web-based control system operates the finished creations over Bluetooth. Running control through a browser rather than an installed application avoids the software deployment problem that defeats a great deal of school technology, where installing anything requires IT approval that may take longer than the term.

50 Schools in Singapore, 200 Worldwide

The reported adoption figures are over 50 schools in Singapore and around 200 internationally, across 15 countries.

The ratio is the notable part. Roughly three quarters of adoption is outside the home market, which is unusual for early-stage education products — most struggle to cross borders because curricula, procurement rules and teaching norms differ by country.

A kit built around universally available materials travels more easily than one dependent on a specific supply chain. There is no localisation problem for a chopstick, and no import complication for a component schools can buy locally.

18,000 Students, 2,000 Teachers

The reported reach is over 18,000 students and more than 2,000 teachers.

That works out to roughly nine students per teacher, which suggests genuine classroom use rather than one-off demonstrations. A product used at a science fair would show a far higher student-to-teacher ratio; sustained teaching produces numbers closer to class sizes.

These are company-reported figures rather than independently audited ones, and should be read as such. They are consistent internally, which is more than can be said for many adoption claims in this sector.

Why Teacher Numbers Matter More

The teacher figure is the more meaningful of the two, and it is the one educational technology usually reports least.

Students use what they are given. Teachers choose what to use, and they are the constraint on whether anything survives past a pilot. A teacher must understand the kit well enough to help when something fails, fit it into a curriculum they are accountable for delivering, and be willing to spend limited lesson time on it.

This is why so much classroom hardware ends up in a cupboard. The equipment works, the students enjoy it, and the teacher cannot reliably run a lesson with it — so it is used once and never again. Two thousand teachers is evidence that the training and support burden is low enough to clear that bar.

The Competition Route

The venture is associated with the Hult Prize 2025, one of the larger international student entrepreneurship competitions.

Competitions of this kind serve a specific function for education ventures. Schools are difficult customers — procurement is slow, budgets are small, and decision-making is distributed — so early revenue is hard to generate regardless of product quality. Competition funding is non-dilutive and arrives without the growth expectations attached to venture capital.

It also provides something more useful than money at this stage: credibility with institutional buyers. A school considering an unfamiliar product from an unknown supplier is reassured by external validation, and a recognised international award functions as exactly that.

Why Low-Cost Materials Beat Bespoke Hardware

The economics of classroom hardware are unforgiving in ways that product design usually ignores.

A class set must survive thirty students handling it repeatedly, be replaceable when pieces disappear, work without specialist technical support, and cost little enough that a department budget covers it. Well-engineered educational hardware frequently fails on the second and fourth of those rather than the first.

Building the structural elements from a commodity item addresses both. Loss is cheap, replacement is immediate, and the engineered components — connectors and electronics — are the parts less likely to be lost or damaged. It is a sound allocation of where manufacturing cost should go.

What This Model Gets Right

Set against the general record of educational technology, the design decisions here address the specific reasons products fail rather than the reasons they impress at demonstrations.

Physical construction gives students something to manipulate rather than another screen. Block programming removes syntax as a barrier to expressing logic. Browser-based control sidesteps school IT restrictions. Commodity structural materials make replacement trivial. Each of these targets a known failure point.

It is a modest product in the best sense — reaching 18,000 students rather than millions, built from cheap materials, solving a defined problem. The educational technology sector has considerably more experience with ambitious platforms that reached scale and taught nobody anything, and a chopstick that survives contact with an actual classroom is the harder achievement.

Conclusion

Stick 'Em is a STEAM education kit built from wooden chopsticks, geometric connectors and plug-and-play electronics, programmed through block coding and controlled over Bluetooth from a browser. Reported adoption covers over 50 schools in Singapore and around 200 worldwide, reaching more than 18,000 students and over 2,000 teachers across 15 countries.

The teacher figure is the one that matters. Educational hardware fails when the person responsible for the lesson cannot run it reliably, and 2,000 teachers using a product is stronger evidence of viability than any student count.

The design insight is that the cheapest possible structural material is the right one. A chopstick can be lost, broken or replaced from a supermarket, which removes the slow degradation that ends most classroom kits — and it puts the manufacturing cost where it belongs, in the connectors and electronics.

Adoption and reach figures in this article are as reported by the company and have not been independently audited.

Data Source and Attribution

Stick 'EmForbes profilePitchBook

Product description, component details and adoption figures — schools, students, teachers and countries — come from the company's own published materials and are company-reported rather than independently verified. Competition association reflects publicly available listings. No individuals are named in this article, as founder details could not be confirmed from primary company sources.

FactsFigs reviews, cleans, and cross-checks every source dataset before shaping it into a data story. Each visualization is created and designed in FactsFigs Design Studio — an internal tool developed and owned by FactsFigs — and is the original work of a FactsFigs author, not an AI-generated copy of any existing graphic. Individual assets within a visual may or may not be produced with AI tools, but the design of the visual itself is solely FactsFigs' own.

Figures are as reported at the time of publication and have not been independently audited.

2026-07-20