Brazil invests US$ 2,525 per student in education and US$ 1,290 per inhabitant in science and technology — the lowest figures among 15 comparable countries, according to the Brazilian Society for the Advancement of Science. Meanwhile, the private sector projects R$ 510.5 billion (BRL) in technologies such as cloud and AI, demanding 570 thousand qualified professionals with salaries 2.6 times above average. The result of this disinvestment shows up in the classroom: in PISA 2022, 55% of Brazilian 15-year-olds scored below the basic proficiency level in science — in mathematics, 73%.
Read those numbers carefully: none of them measures a lack of talent. They measure a lack of investment — the lab that never arrived, the teacher without training, the career no one ever presented. As our manifesto says, the peripheries are not a place of waiting, they are a place of beginning: of ideas, of technologies, of new ways of living and deciding the future of one’s own story. Genius already lives in the quebrada — whoever turns scarce resources into abundant creativity does engineering every single day, just without the title, the equipment and the diploma. Our job is to make the doors open from the inside.
models we forged, got wrong and got right.
Since 2021 we have been evolving how we do STEAM education with territories, schools and partner organizations. Hackerclubes and Minas em Tech are the real models we forged, refined, got wrong and got right: hands-on, creative journeys that develop STEAM skills, strengthen peripheral youth identities and protagonism, and connect territorial knowledge with emerging technologies — because the starting point is never the deficit, it is the repertoire young people already bring.
Hackerclubes was born in community spaces and reached 3 territories in 2021 with sponsorship from the Robert Bosch Institute; today it is a network of more than 125 young people in 6 cities, with 50% of places reserved for diversity and inclusion, 7 months of hands-on work per cohort — and since 2025 it has been scaling to São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. Minas em Tech, launched in 2022 in Sumaré with sponsorship from PPG Brasil, reserved all places from 2022 to 2024 for girls and women, with a 150-hour track.
In the innovation challenges, they are the ones who design: a sustainable village where residents trade recyclables for food from the garden, a model house with tag-based locks, sound sensors and a solar-powered pool, a robot cart for monitoring wildfires. None of these MVPs came from a textbook — they came from the problems and dreams the cohorts themselves brought from their territories, prototyped with 3D printers, electronics and code.
The infrastructure keeps up with the ambition: we set up 3D printers, virtual reality headsets, electronics kits and sensors in the territories — like the STEAM lab at Jardim Campo Belo, created in 2023 with the ProDica Institute and Amazon — and we take the classes to where science happens: Sirius, at CNPEM, the Jean Nicolini Municipal Observatory of Campinas and the Brazilian Creative Learning Conference. Not as a field trip, but as a message: these places belong to you too. The curve tells the rest: from 20 people reached in 2022 to 125 in 2025.
girls and women at the center.
Gender equity in technology is not a slice of the program — it is the program. In December 2025, Minas em Tech took the STEAM-education-for-girls agenda to broadcast TV, on the Mulher.com show, engaging educators, families and public administrators. In technical cooperation with the British Council, our professionals took part in the Mulheres em Tech program — and Casa Hacker was one of the institutions selected to replicate the methodology, training new generations of women leaders in the sector.
And the same agenda we practice in the classroom, we defend in the law: the Minas em Tech experience feeds the advocacy of the Coalition for Feminine Genius on Bill PL 840/2021, which promotes women’s participation in science and technology careers — the full story is on the Policy Advocacy page. Peripheral feminine genius is not a promise: it is a heritage this country has yet to learn to recognize.
what we learn, we document.
Every edition becomes a tested, documented social technology — curricula, kits and learnings published in our library — because the goal was never to teach forever: it is for a broad network of partners to replicate the models, with the same quality, where we do not yet reach. The future is already being written in every hacker-lab class, in every young person who discovers they can code — our role is to make sure it leaves the realm of the possible and becomes everyday life.