SAPIENT, the South African Planetary Institute for Exploring Nature with Technology, brings planetary science and technology together. Its main activity is the Mars Yard: a Mars-like landscape in Cape Town, and a rover that learners drive with code.
David Campey
David Campey has been enjoyineering as a software developer and start-up tech builder in Cape Town for 20+ years. He is the founder of afrolabs.co.za and coderlevelup.org, and a founding member of SAPIENT.
David has grown into a role leading the growth of Code Club and, through that, supporting the roll-out of the new Coding & Robotics Curriculum in South Africa. His turtle-bots project typifies how we can work to make robotics more exciting and accessible.
Dr. Matthew S. Huber
Dr. Matthew S. Huber is a Research Scientist at the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona, a Senior Lecturer at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban, South Africa, and a founding member of SAPIENT.
He has run workshops on impact craters for NASA, organised conferences for the European Astrobiology Institute, and lectured on impact craters for many public organisations. His research has been published in high-ranking journals, and his work has been featured in Newsweek, Fox News, the Washington Post, EOS and Live Science, among other outlets. He has also taken part in numerous radio interviews.
Dr. Huber received his doctorate in planetary science from the University of Vienna and then worked at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel in Belgium before relocating to South Africa.
Collaborators
Curriculum: Dominique Cave
Dominique Cave is an ICT integrator and a coding, robotics and computer science educator in Cape Town: a teacher, learning designer, teacher trainer and specialist in bringing ICT into education. She is a local organiser of NASA’s Space Apps Challenge (spaceappschallenge.org), runs ICT Learner and, with Frances Cave, The Learning Caves, which makes hands-on learning content for South African classrooms. She holds a Master of Education in ICT in Education from the University of Johannesburg, is a Senior Examiner for the IB Diploma Programme’s ITGS course, and recently worked with the Raspberry Pi Foundation on curriculum projects and lesson design for South African schools.
Dominique is working with SAPIENT to bridge into the classroom, through curriculum integrations and co-creating content with us, including the classroom and club materials in Code Club and the new curriculum.
Mission Control 2026
Mission Control, the cloud platform behind the Mars Yard, was built in 2026 by a group of University of Cape Town Information Systems honours students, mentored by Werner Van Rensburg of impact.com. Read more on the Mars Yard project page.
- Werner Van Rensburg, mentor. Senior Director of Engineering at impact.com.
- Kamogelo Tsele, BCom (Hons) Information Systems at the University of Cape Town.
- Konke Cele, BCom (Hons) Information Systems at the University of Cape Town, and founder of Azania Custom Tech.
- Yamkela Dludla, BCom (Hons) Information Systems at the University of Cape Town.
- Hlalanathi Mashimbye, BCom (Hons) Information Systems at the University of Cape Town.
Organisations
SAPIENT’s work is hosted, incubated and sponsored by these organisations.
Cape Town Science Centre
A registered non-profit and public benefit organisation in Observatory, Cape Town. It offers interactive exhibits, hands-on workshops and science shows, school and teacher programmes, and a mobile science centre that takes science to communities across the Western Cape. Its projects include robotics education, a network of more than 230 STEM clubs, and Code Club. The Science Centre hosts the Mars Yard as an exhibit, so visitors and learners can see their code run on the real rover. ctsc.org.za
Coder Level Up
Coder Level Up works on “levelling up our coding community, in Africa”, mainly in South Africa. It supports free coding clubs and competitive robotics programmes for young people, and works with regional partners to grow communities around Code Club, an initiative of the Raspberry Pi Foundation. Coder Level Up is incubating SAPIENT and connecting it to Code Club. coderlevelup.org
impact.com
A global partnership management platform that helps companies discover, manage and measure partnerships such as affiliate, influencer, creator and referral programmes, with more than 1,000 people in 21 offices, including Cape Town. Through its Impact Academy, which grows new talent, impact.com sponsored the UCT Information Systems honours group who built the Mission Control cloud platform for the Mars Yard. impact.com