Chong Ing Kai: Chopstick Robots, ADHD Grit and Why Tinkering Beats Traditional STEAM – E649
episode
BRAVE Southeast Asia Tech: Singapore, Indonesia, Vietnam, Philippines, Thailand & Malaysia Startups, Founders & Venture Capital VC (English)
34 min
1 speaker
8 chapters
transcribed 17 days ago
Transcript
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Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Who is Chong Ing Kai and what inspired him to start Stick’Em?
Always getting into trouble when I was young, constantly suspended. Very typical it is. It's not gonna stop me from being impulsive. It's not something that is a discipline issue. I mean the impulsiveness part I say is like double-edged sword. It's good to have people like want to solve things, want to do certain stuff. I I think we need more of that actually. But I think what's more important for parent side is to make sure that young kids in general don't fall down this path of very bad sleep habits, addicted to junk food. things that feed that impulse. It's such a huge issue for kids with ADHD. Even for me, I find myself sometimes falling into this trap again and again. Yeah. So I think that's the bigger issue.
Welcome to Brave. Learn from Southeast Asia's best tech leaders. Build the future, learn from our past, and stay human in between. No BS on Success. I'm Jeremy O, Venture Capitalist, Sarah founder, Harvard MBA, science fiction nerd, and dad of two daughters. Every week, we debate startup news, interview change makers, answer listener questions, and share personal insights. Join our movement of over 40,000 members and get transcripts, resources, and community at www.bravesea.com. Stay well and stay brave. Hey Kai, so excited to have you on the show. Thanks for having me. I just want to say congratulations on winning the million dollars. But we'll get into it. So I wanted to hear and be talking about I think education, your experiences with ADHD, your philosophy on what education tech looks like.
And so I think there's a great opportunity, Top. Could you introduce yourself?
Yeah. So I'm Kai, founder of Stick'em.
Why do schools struggle with quality STEAM programs?
Yeah. We started Stick'em when we were seventeen, five years ago. And the whole idea came about because we used to build things since like primary school, building all sorts of crazy stuff. And growing up, we had a lot of access to these great opportunities. We were quite privileged. So we could you know build whatever we wanted, didn't have to worry too much about resources. And after we graduated from secondary school, we Quickly realized that, hey, we went to a school of science and technology, which is a very independent, specialized school. And we started to see that as we were working as robotics teachers and trainers for like private companies and vendors, we were like, hey, most of these schools do not have the same resources or capacity that our school had.
And the teacher, there's a few reasons to this. The teachers are too busy, it's not in the directive of the school, the strategy. And what this means is that the schools were basically getting private vendors to come in, run the program like one-soft program, and then they go. And these vendors are more businessmen than educators, which means that the students are not getting good quality program to education. So okay, we are fresh out of secondary school, we have all these skills, why not we try to solve this for ourselves? So got my friends together and we just started sketch, we sketched this idea of, okay, let's make something like Lego Robotics. But ten times cheaper. Much cheaper. It gets kids to be a bit more creative than just building a Lego creation.
And let's try to work with schools. So that was five years ago. We got together, built a prototype within a few weeks, and we used a school makers like our fabrication lab. So everything was free. We spent a total maybe a hundred dollars of our own money. Got a prototype. We started to test it with our parents' friends' kids. We went to school. teachers that we knew, just started testing and slowly by slowly we started to grow the more idea. No idea. Yeah. Yeah. So that was five years ago. We've competed since we work with around hundred plus schools across eleven countries. Well. Mostly Singapore still. Yeah. But yeah, we make chopstick robots.
But and I think you've done such a tremendous job over the past five years. I wanna go all the way back to the beginning, right? Because i you studied uh polytechnic, you were a student, you have uh built this company.
How did the idea of using chopsticks for robotics come about?
So how did you even come up with the idea at the age of seventeen?
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
Who is Chong Ing Kai and what inspired him to start Stick’Em?
0:00–1:40
2
Why do schools struggle with quality STEAM programs?
1:40–3:43
3
How did the idea of using chopsticks for robotics come about?
3:43–6:17
4
In what ways do teachers integrate Stick’Em into core subjects?
6:17–8:42
5
How does ADHD affect learning and what habits help manage it?
8:42–10:46
6
What changes did Stick’Em make to move from one‑time hardware sales to recurring school revenue?
10:46–12:18
7
How did winning the Hult Prize accelerate Stick’Em’s growth and global reach?
12:18–14:25
8
What future vision does Kai have for hands‑on learning in an AI‑driven world?
14:25–34:48
Speakers
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