ABOUT SAYANSIA
Sayansi ni ya kufanya.
Science is for doing.
OUR MISSION
To give every science student their own virtual bench — where they learn by building, making mistakes, and solving real exam practicals.
Enock Markinga
Founder
WHO BUILT IT
The lab technician who built the bench he wished he'd had
Before Sayansia, Enock Markinga ran the lab, not the lesson.
As a school lab technician, he rationed reagents, patched cracked glassware, and set up the practical exam for a whole class, knowing there were far fewer benches than students. He didn't read about the practical-exam gap in a report. He restocked it every term.
Before the lab, there was rugby.
Every good coach says the same thing: you don't fix a mistake on matchday, you fix it in the hundred repetitions nobody sees. The team that drills the boring parts is the team that doesn't fumble when it counts. Sayansia is that idea applied to a titration instead of a lineout. Practise the practical, then sit the exam.
Two halves of the same job.
Enock studied bioinformatics, biotechnology and microbiology at the University of Nairobi, then education at the University of Nottingham. One half is knowing the science cold: which glassware, which reagent, which step fails first if you rush it. The other is knowing how students really learn it, including the moment they grab the wrong measuring cylinder and have to work out why it can't give them a titre. That mix of lab experience and teaching training is hard for a software-only team to copy. It's why Sayansia's mark schemes follow how examiners actually grade, and why the "wrong" apparatus is on the shelf on purpose.
Sayansia is the bench he wished the twenty-eighth student in line had got.
In practice, nobody's watching. Now everybody gets to run it.
Goggles on, always.
WHY IT EXISTS
The bench was always the bottleneck
A school lab has twelve benches. The class has forty students. Reagents are expensive and used up whether the practical goes well or not, glassware breaks, and the rota only stretches so far. So the practical becomes a demonstration, and most of the room watches.
Students then sit a practical paper that assumes none of that happened — that they have handled the apparatus, sequenced a setup, taken a reading that disagreed with the one before it, and worked out why. They lose marks not because they don't know the chemistry, but because they have never done the thing.
Sayansia exists to close that specific gap. Not to replace the lab — schools that use us already have one — but to make the bench reach the whole class instead of the front row.
WHAT WE BELIEVE
Built to fail, on purpose
Most simulations auto-correct the student into a clean result. Ours doesn't — because the correction is the part worth paying for.
Mistakes are the lesson
A wrong choice is explained, not silently blocked. Reach for a measuring cylinder to take a titre and you find out why it can't give you one — which is the moment the learning happens.
The boring parts are the parts
Rinse before you fill. Clamp before you load. The steps a demonstration skips are exactly the steps the mark scheme pays for, so the bench makes you do them.
A score shouldn't claim more than it knows
Where a mark genuinely depends on the supervisor's own readings, we report that it needs your eye instead of inventing a number. A confident wrong score is worse than no score.
A phone is a bench
No install, no lab rota, no reagents to replace. A student can run the same practical at home, at night, as many times as it takes.
WHAT'S ON THE BENCH
Three syllabuses, every experiment runnable
EXPERIMENTS
Apparatus, setup stages, safety notes, and what the results should actually look like.
PAST PAPERS
Loaded whole — confidential instructions, question paper and mark scheme — and marked point by point.
SYLLABUSES
- Cambridge IGCSE
- Cambridge International A-Level
- Kenyan CBC (Grade 7–12)
WHERE WE ARE
Nairobi, Kenya
Built for the syllabuses taught here, against the mark schemes marked here. Sayansia also runs a physical lab in Nairobi where students book bench time on real apparatus.