Student Journeys.
Some students stay with us for five years — same school, often the same teacher. A five-year journey can't be manufactured, which is why we can only show you a few of them. This is the first.
Prateek.
He joined at nine, wanting to make a game about Pokémon. Six years later he's building with AI. One school, one arc, the whole way through.
First class: Scratch, and a game about Pokémon
Prateek's first project was a Scratch game built around the characters he already loved. His teacher's note from that month: "Asks 'what if' more than 'how'. Keep him."
From blocks to the browser
The year he stopped dragging blocks and started writing HTML and CSS by hand — the first time the thing he built was made of text he had typed himself.
Python, and then machine learning
The move from blocks to text is where many kids stall. Prateek's teacher slowed the pace for two months — same teacher who taught him Scratch, so she knew exactly which concepts he already owned and which were genuinely new. By the end of the year he had gone past the language itself and into machine learning.
CEL Hackathon — first nationally
A pair project built around a UN Sustainable Development Goal on good health and well-being. They took first place nationally — but the line worth keeping is what he said about the work rather than the result: he cared that the code held up.
Work of his own, beyond the syllabus
A full Pygame project with enemy pathfinding he researched himself — beyond the syllabus, because the syllabus follows the student here, not the other way round.
Building with AI
Currently building with AI, including a physics-based simulation engine in Python. The apprentice has started working on problems nobody set him.
The teen builder.
Six years in, Prateek is what we mean when we say coding is a craft: someone who chose the field early, was apprenticed properly, and now builds because it's who he is, not what he was enrolled in.
A note for parents of teenagers: yes, arcs like these help with college. A sixteen-year-old with years of real, finished work is the applicant an admissions reader remembers. But here, that's a consequence — never the goal. We'd rather raise the person than manufacture the application.