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!