She won robotics prizes, then spent her Saturdays teaching Scratch
At 14, Sinead Samputh turned two Inspired Builds wins into a free coding class in a Durban informal settlement.
Most people who win a robotics competition get a trophy and a shelf. Sinead Samputh got a to-do list.
Samputh is a Grade 9 student at Reddam House Umhlanga in Durban. She has won her age category twice at Inspired Builds, a global inter-school robotics contest run by Inspired Education Group. The first win came with BAYMIN, a healthcare-assistant robot meant to make basic health screening more accessible. The second came this year with BAYMIN AIR, a prototype that uses an air-quality sensor and LED indicators to flag low, medium or high risk. It was inspired by an influenza outbreak among students at her school, Bizcommunity reported.
Then she asked what the prizes were for. “I don’t want to win if winning means leaving others behind,” she told The Mercury.
A syllabus and three tablets
The answer is BAYMIN LABS, a free, youth-led coding initiative for children aged 9 to 13. Samputh wrote her own six-week curriculum, built around Scratch, the visual programming platform for animations and interactive stories. She raised R13,650 from corporate donors to buy three Samsung tablets and protective cases.
Classes run on Saturdays, hosted with The Seed Fund, a nonprofit that supports families in Durban’s Malacca Road informal settlement, where she already volunteers at a homework club. The first cohort was nine Grade 3 and 4 pupils, many with no coding experience, and the programme has since grown to include older children, The Mercury reported.
Samputh described one small win to Bizcommunity: watching a shy student raise his hand to answer a question for the first time.
What comes next
She told reporters the thinking behind it is that “a solution can change a moment. The ability to solve can change a life.” Next on her list is BAYMIN Academy, a paid coding enrichment programme designed to fund the free classes, and a push to reach other underserved communities. The Mercury reports she has also logged more than 200 hours of coding training herself, and that her long-term goals are neurosurgery and biomedical engineering.
It is early days, and the story is a few weeks old. But the structure is sound: a student turns recognition into a repeatable class, then sets up a way to pay for it.
