Our partnership with the Australian Computer Society (ACS) through the Gateway to Industry Schools Program (GISP) has now reached more than 8,000 students across Queensland. We started in 2021 with a pilot delivering robotics workshops to a handful of South East Queensland schools, and it's grown into one of the state's largest hands-on STEM programs.
The program runs free, facilitator-led robotics workshops directly into schools. Students get to program Rovers and learn about careers in ICT, engineering, and robotics. We tailor workshops to different year levels, from intro sessions for primary students through to Python programming for senior secondary.
Hitting 8,000 students reflects how far the program has spread geographically. We've run workshops in metro Brisbane, regional centres including Cairns, Townsville, Rockhampton, and Toowoomba, and remote communities that often don't have easy access to specialist STEM resources.
Teachers and school leaders consistently tell us the workshops spark a lasting interest in digital tech. Plenty of schools that started with the program have gone on to buy their own Micromelon class sets and build robotics into their ongoing curriculum.
The partnership has also been hugely valuable for our product development. Feedback from thousands of students and hundreds of teachers across very different school contexts has fed straight into improvements in the Code Editor, Simulator, and our teaching resources.
Reaching 8,000 students is a milestone we're really proud of. But honestly, the bit we care about most is the teachers telling us their students are now picking IT subjects, or kids saying they want to be engineers. That's what we're working toward.