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Since my last post, things have been quietly happening in the background. One of the primary task was the budget finalisation/grant approval process. I was not much involved in this but the heavy work was done by the Chetna and Azim Premji Foundation team.

The grant got approved a few weeks ago:

Now it was time to execute!

Brochure

Indu ji, Rekhaji and team had began outreach, but they needed some sort of “pitch”. In this case, the form of the pitch needed was a brochure which they could share with the key people at the school and the students themselves.

I started working on it on priority as the schools were going to get closed soon after the board examinations.

We started with some AI generated layouts. But I didn’t like the output and it did not have much control. I ended up crafting all the 4 pages from scratch in Figma:

Hrishi, Sunil ji, and the Chetna team helped with review and inputs to improve.

The Visits

While the iterations for the Brochure were in progress, Rekhaji and I started visiting a few schools together. Every morning at 9AM, she should pick me up, and we would meet the principals of the schools to brief them about CS17 and also schedule a session with the students.

Here is a picture from our session with the eligible students at Eklavya Model Residential School, Tokapal:

In this session, we started with an introduction of the students. Then we explained what the programme is about, the field of Computers, how will the logistics work, etc. It ended with a discussion on the entrance test.

Designing the Entrance Test

Talking about the entrance test, it was to be done on priority, because the 12th boards were ending in a few days and the students would go home.

I have been working on designing the paper for a while, but there was no substantial progress. The work expands to fill the available time they say 😅

After the dates of the entrance examinations were set for a few schools, it had to be done. So, I took help of Vishwajeet (he has good experience with a variety of entrance exams) from our team and we did a 2-day sprint to create a balanced question paper containing three sections: Logical Reasoning, Basic Mathematics, and English.

We then translated it to Hindi, took a few print outs in both languages, and got to war room mode:

The team started solving questions, reviewing the copy in Hindi, etc. After a thorough review and fixes, we finally sent out the question papers to the Chetna team. From here, they took over and have been taking the organizing these tests.

I have even received the first set of answer sheets yesterday.

The Landing Page

It suddenly stuck me that since we now have the brochure with the relevant content and design language, building a nice landing page would be much easier. So, one fine morning I sat down and built it: cs17.org (yup, brand new domain!).

AI

Honestly, things have changed a lot in this area. LLMs have gotten too good. I have a $100/mo subscription to Claude Code and this is one of the best value for money I am getting from any tool right now. Here are practical things in which AI helped us during the process:

• LaTeX based question paper: I wanted a professionally set entrance test and this was the way. Claude helped me setup the project, researched what CBSE etc. use for setting up question papers, and also created a Hindi version of the same.

• Brochure -> Website: I used Claude + Figma MCP to bring the initial version of the landing page live. It accurately brought over all the images, icons, text, etc. and then after a few prompts, it was ready to publish!

• Question Paper: Although we could not trust the AI here, we did use it to brainstorm ideas and generated varieties of questions we felt were good.

• Brochure Translation: Figma’s AI based translation feature was spot on and translated the entire brochure in a minute!

I hope this section does not feel like an Ad for these tools 😂, but I felt it was necessary for the sake of transparency.

Up Next

We will now start grading the submitted tests and I am personally working on the curriculum bit.