From a visiting child to a Thợ Cả (master maker) who comes back to coach. The robot is only the vehicle; what grows is the child.
A pottery village keeps its glaze recipes; a weaving village keeps its dyes. Làng Maker (the Maker Village) is a craft village too, except its secrets are open source. The Già Làng (elders) keep the customs, the Thợ Cả (masters) work alongside, and the apprentices watch, then do it themselves.
There are no lectures here. A child walks into the workshop, picks up a robot and starts. Knowledge is not poured in; the child builds it while making, testing, breaking and fixing.
Curiosity first — no lessons yet
Children touch, try, break things, and try again at play stations. No lectures, no grades — just enough to spark one question: how does this actually work?
The Curious One
Get hands-on: build something that works
Seven sessions with one guide, turning the question from Play into a real product — one you can hold, run, break, and fix.
The Maker
Once it’s done, tell others about it
Children stand up and tell the story themselves: what they set out to build, where it broke, how they fixed it. Being able to explain it to someone else is what real understanding looks like.
The Storyteller
Once Share is done, loop back to Play with a harder question
Each cycle is eight sessions. Seven are workshop sessions: play and make. The eighth is Chợ Phiên (market day): the child demonstrates the product to parents and friends. That is why parents are invited to session 8, and it is the Share beat of the loop.
Nobody has to climb all the way. Each stage is a real place in the village, with work to do and a milestone to recognise.
How your child grows: Dares to touch, dares to try, is not afraid of mistakes.
Tools: NEO One computer with GCompris in Vietnamese · Camera and voice games on NEO · Lesson 1 on the simulator, no robot needed
Stage 1
Stage 2
How your child grows: Fixes their own bugs and keeps going until the robot runs.
Tools: ThingBot with ThingBlock block programming · micro:bit with MakeCode · Tinkercad: drawing the 3D part you need
Stage 3
Stage 4
How your child grows: Builds real projects, works in a team, enters a first competition.
Tools: ThingBot with sensors and a PS2 controller · Tinkercad Circuits, App Inventor for a robot-control app · FanRoc and BlueSilk-style projects
Stage 5
Stage 6
How your child grows: Leads, teaches the younger ones, carries the flag abroad.
Tools: VIA board and the K12 Maker kit, Arduino C · The VIA e-book on self-driving cars and AI · FTC, FIRST Global, NASA Space Apps
Stage 7
Stage 8
Whoever learns at the village passes it on to four people. Not a duty, but how the village grows: today's Khách Làng is tomorrow's Thợ Cả.
The village learns the way Seymour Papert (MIT) described in Mindstorms: children learn deepest when they make something they care about, and a robot is an “object to think with”. The five principles below are not theory; they are five scenes you see every week at the village.
1
A six-year-old holds a NEO One and drives a ThingBot in the very first session. Nobody lectures first. Questions come after the hands have touched.
2
If the robot veers, the child adjusts the two wheel speeds. If the BlueSilk silkworm chamber runs hot, the child changes the relay threshold. Hard, but the kind of hard they want to beat.
3
One ThingBot: at 6 you press buttons, at 10 you program in blocks, at 15 you write Arduino. The same robot competes, raises silkworms and watches the house.
4
The mentor asks “what have you tried?” instead of taking the screwdriver. Parents sit a little further away. Using AI to build a game is fine, but the child is the designer and the one who checks when the machine is wrong.
5
Session 8 is Chợ Phiên: the child tells parents and friends how it works. The FIRST Global team comes back to the village to teach the younger ones.
This way of working draws on MIT's FabLab, the Arduino community and the FIRST competitions. Read more on the three pillars of our philosophy →
Two pieces of evidence from the village itself, so parents can see how far this path goes.
Starting from a real problem in a silk village, the children built a rearing chamber with temperature and humidity sensors, a relay for the fan and a servo for the door. They wired the circuit, chose the thresholds, and when the worms got sick they read the data to fix it.
The product also has a web game and a 3D version so that anyone without the hardware can play. That is the Share beat: what is made at the village goes out for others to use.
Source: Làng Maker's BlueSilk project, public web build at bluesilk-vr.vercel.app (29 Sep 2026)
Vietnam's team at the FIRST Global Challenge 2025 in Panama came home with the Silver Medal of the Jackie Bezos Award, a Top 12 overall finish, the Storytelling Award and the Social Media Award. The year before, the team competed in Athens.
What the village is prouder of than the medals: the students put “professional and kind” first, and on returning they went to Hope School to teach younger children. That is the Returning-to-the-roots stage.
Source: Team Vietnam - FIRST Global fan page, FGC 2025 wrap-up post of 3 Nov 2025; albums FGC 2024 Athens and Team Vietnam × Hope School