Why I co-founded a coding club in my village school, How?

I had money lying around.
I am bad at investing.
I am a good human.

No, that’s not it.

I was having stressful times at work and in personal life with these work from home bubbles. When there’s a meeting coming up at work, I had anxiety and would have a panic attack. I tried to quit my job and failed. I needed help. I sought help. I got help. But I needed to do more.

Helping others has been my go-to mode of therapy in hard times. I prided myself helping my colleagues get past their roadblocks, I always got good feeling out of making people feel better. I did it because it made me feel better, for myself.

Yes, that’s it.

I remember the first time I had seen a computer. I was 10, living in dormitory with fellow home sick kids. My school had computer lab which had big sized computers. We learnt drawing on Microsoft XP. It wasn’t a kid friendly setting, we never felt free to explore computers. We only liked it for air conditioning in the summer.

Computers, when they come in big sizes overwhelms kids, and they don’t feel free. I wanted kids in my village to feel free and safe around computers. Someone else had similar intentions, he works in IT too. We reached out to an NGO he advices on their digital education strategy. We didn’t get funding. We had money we could give away and not feel sad about it. So we did it.

RaspberryPi came to the rescue. They had low-cost credit card sized computers. It fits in your pocket but has enough power to run Raspbian, ubuntu. It made sense. We got LG 21” monitors. Five of each. School management have given us a room to develop the lab. We got electric boards set up, made desks out of plywood from DIY table tennis board we made for the covid summer.

Kids are now learning to draw, type documents, make presentations and programming in scratch. I helped make something that helps others and now i feel better about it.

Past

Present

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