The wizard of tech

A tech wizard is on the loose in the learner jungle of Sacred Heart College in Observatory and is quietly blazing the trail of the robotics space of Johannesburg.

He goes by the name of Sifiso Nkabinde, a 15-year-old Grade 10 learner at the school who is set to conquer the tech space with his innovations and desire to be among those leading this city into the 4th Industrial Revolution, better known as 4IR.

Sifiso was one of the many presenters invited to talk on their tech projects at the second annual Red Bull Basement, which is an entrepreneurial workshop held at the Tshimologong Precinct in Braamfontein.

He has been blazing the tech space since the age of nine while still a Grade 4 learner at his primary school, Education Alive School in the Jozi CBD before attending Sacred Heart in 2017 for his high school education.

While at primary school, Sifiso hooked up with the Sci-Bono Discovery Centre in Newtown, Johannesburg, which is a stone’s throw from his former primary school and also close to his home which is within the vicinity of the hustle and bustle of Park Station.

He then fell in love with the world of robotics at this multi-disciplinary institution of high tech and started building robotics and in 2017 took part in the First Tech Challenge. This is an annual international competition in which hundreds of people participate and begins at the regional level in your own country and runs up to national level, with the winners then progressing into the international arena, he said. In his first entry, Sifiso, who works on multiple computer projects, only managed to conquer the regional and national phases of the competition and missed out on the international one after failing to accumulate enough points that would have paved his way into the last leg of the international competition.

Sifiso built robots that can perform various tasks in a controlled environment, either through a remote control system or in an automated manner, and entrants got awarded points on the number of tasks performed and completed and judges also look at how complex the robot was.

“We now want to take the robot to another level where it can identify objects and then act based on what it sees, before we embark on a much more advanced and complex stage of producing a gaming robot, and the final level would be taking it to real life situations where it can perform a variety of tasks and chores in the home and outside,” Sifiso said.

It all started at a tender age when his father Nicholas and mother Cebisile who hail from KwaNongoma in KwaZulu-Natal, used to buy their first- born son of three children’s toys, but out of curiosity, Sifiso would dismantle the toys wanting to know what was inside and how and what made that particular toy to behave in the manner it did.

His dad, a security guard, opened an account for him at an internet café and Sifiso started exploring the mechanics of cars and started regularly visiting the library at Library Gardens to read more on the Stem subjects (science, technology, engineering, and maths).

Sifiso, whose mother is a waitress at a restaurant in Parkhurst, hopes to study a multiple of disciplines which will involve the Stem subjects to advance his robotics project for artificial intelligence and information security.

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