I worked as a Software Engineer at
Avanti
Fellows, a non-profit founded in 2010 by
Akshay
Saxena that works
with students from low-income backgrounds to support
them in
getting into good engineering and medical colleges,
providing
a pathway out of
engineering and medical colleges, providing a pathway
out of
poverty. We built several
open-source
products to improve how our students learn. Notably, we
built
Plio, an open-source
tool
that converts any YouTube video into an interactive
lesson
plan and provides educators all the
learning data at the level of each student. It increased
the
completion rates on our videos by 5x and was used by >
40000
students in Haryana during the COVID-19 pandemic. We
were
part of the 7th Cohort of
The
Nudge Incubator and won the
Tools
Competition by
Schmidt Futures under the "Accelerating Learning" track
in
2022-23. Plio continues to be used by Avanti Fellows to
support students in their learning and is being used by
other non-profits like
The
Apprentice Project (TAP) in their
programs as well.
I built the first version of Avanti's Quizzing Engine,
an
open-source platform for students to practice and
prepare
for their exams. The quizzing engine is in active
development and regularly being used by thousands of
students.
Here is
a demo of the quizzing engine in action!
In the
journey, we got to go to incredible places and meet
amazing
people. We even gave a presentation only using memes.
Visiting Tehri for a retreat with other tech-focused
non-profits is
a
memory that
I will always cherish. You can read about our experience
here!
