By Barbara Dale-Jones
It’s now our fifth year. When I say that out loud, it still catches me a little off guard. Not because the time has flown, but because of how much ground we’ve covered from such an unlikely starting point.
It began, as so many unexpected things did, in 2020. The world had just ground to a halt. Schools were closed. Offices were empty. And a question that had been nagging at us for years suddenly felt urgent: why does formal education so consistently fail to prepare young people for the working world they need to enter?
Alison Jacobson and I had been wrestling with this question for a while. Conventional schooling was producing young people who could pass exams but struggled to think creatively, collaborate under pressure, or solve problems they hadn’t been specifically trained to solve. The World Economic Forum was saying that the top skills of the future (analytical thinking, complex problem-solving, creativity, resilience) were exactly the ones that schools weren’t developing. COVID didn’t create that problem. It just made it impossible to ignore.
So in 2020, Alison and I launched Rocket School online. The idea was to use the design thinking methodology that works so well in corporate innovation contexts and bring it to young people, packaged in a way that was genuinely engaging. The vehicle we chose was role-playing games. RPGs turn out to be a surprisingly powerful learning modality: they require collaborative storytelling, strategic thinking, empathy, and real-time problem-solving. Combine that with design thinking principles and some basic coding, and you have something unusual, a programme where kids have fun while developing skills that employers desperately want.
What surprised us was the reach. During lockdown, children from South Africa, Namibia, Germany, Croatia, Mexico, New Zealand and elsewhere were logging on each week. The online sessions worked. Kids who had never met were collaborating across time zones, learning to communicate, challenge each other’s thinking, and build things together. It was a raving success.
But it was in conversation with David Kramer that we pushed the question further. David, a highly experienced educator and skills development practitioner with decades of work across education, training and the digital industry, had been closely involved in the thinking behind Rocket School from the start. And with him we kept returning to a harder, more uncomfortable version of the central question: this is working beautifully for children with access. What about the ones without it?
It was David who was instrumental in making the Limpopo pilot happen. He helped shape the approach, pushed for the partnerships on the ground, and ensured that what we designed was genuinely adapted for a different reality: rural communities, second-language English speakers, erratic connectivity, young people who had never had access to anything like this before.
In late 2020, we ran a pilot called Rocket Sparks with the Siyafunda Community Technology Centre, reaching thirty Grade 9 learners across three locations: two villages in deep rural Limpopo (Hlomela and Bjatladi) and a peri-urban site in Palmridge, east of Johannesburg.
Each learner had access to a connected laptop at a community ICT centre. We trained them on Zoom, adapted the materials for second-language English speakers, translated visual content into vernacular, and brought in experienced facilitators. What we saw in those five weeks genuinely moved us. Learners who had been reluctant to speak in the first session were, by the end, debating, collaborating, and giving each other constructive feedback. The improvement in communication, design thinking, and teamwork was visible to everyone in the room and on screen.
The pilot proved the concept. But it also raised a harder question. These young people were talented, motivated, and hungry to learn. But they weren’t children looking for enrichment activities. They were school-leavers and young adults sitting at the sharpest edge of South Africa’s unemployment crisis, facing an economy in which youth unemployment for those aged 15-24 would later reach over 62%. What they needed wasn’t a Saturday programme. They needed something that could genuinely change their trajectory.
That realisation drove 2021. Alison, David, and I, together with LEAP schools founder, John Gilmour and our growing team, spent that year designing something more comprehensive: a full immersive programme that didn’t just teach design thinking as a concept, but embedded it as a way of working, learning, and being. We called it the Design Thinkers Laboratory. d-lab.
We launched d-lab in 2022. The model we built was a nine-month full-time programme focused on design thinking, digital literacy, and work readiness. Crucially, we abandoned conventional teaching entirely. Students take responsibility for their own learning, guided by mentors and facilitators from the world of work. They complete design thinking sprints on real problems. They build portfolios of evidence. They do internships. They develop not just skills, but character: the resilience, curiosity, and integrity that employers consistently say they can’t find in new hires.
The results have kept surprising us. From our first cohort, within two months of graduating, 60% of students had found their next opportunity: employment, further study, or a business of their own. By 2024, 80% of graduates were placed in jobs within three months. In 2025, 29% secured employment before they even graduated. Students from d-lab have gone on to conduct design thinking research for major banks and insurers, run AI training workshops across multiple provinces, and build businesses of their own. One graduate has conducted Design Thinking training workshops with SITA (the State Information Technology Agency) across the country.
We’re now operating in three provinces (Gauteng, the Western Cape, and Mpumalanga) through a network of partner STEM hubs that share our values and contribute venues, infrastructure, and mentorship. Our curriculum has evolved to integrate AI literacy and what we call “Cyborg Habits,” building the daily practices that make AI a tool for empowerment, not displacement.
Five years in, d-lab is reimagining digital skills development, which is what it says under our logo, and what we mean by it. The economy isn’t waiting for our young people to catch up. But with the right programme, the right methodology, and the right belief in what young people from disadvantaged communities are capable of, we can close that gap faster than anyone expects.
That is what we set out to do in a Zoom call during lockdown in 2020. Lives have changed since then. And we’re just getting started.