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.

30 hours

Around 9.30 AM, I left my house to pick up Hrishi from Devansh, the hotel he was staying. He had arrived early morning on a train from Vizag and was already done with his routine morning jog. We had a nice south indian breakfast together and headed to our (BWH) office.

Sunil ji was on the way, and Indu ji was already at Chetna’s Jagdalpur office, where we planned to have our first planning session. After some general chit chat, Hrishi, Rahul (my colleague), and I left for Chetna’s office. Sunil ji arrived at the same time.

Hrishi’s flight was at 4PM next day, so we had about 30 hours in our hands.

The Agenda

Hrishi started by setting the context and noting down points to be discussed on the black board:

It turned out to be a long list. I will just brief on a few important ones here. Thanks to Rahul for taking elaborate notes.

Positioning

How is this programme different from other vocational computer training programs? BCA? Generic computer trainings?

The answer is Rigour.

Most training programmes are very basic and do not convert to actually employable software developers (even engineering degrees 🙈).

Even though such crash courses promise placements. Mostly the attendees are ready for a job as a data entry operator or similar.

The goal with CS17 is to have a high-end training course on Computer Science foundations and programming. As I have mentioned already in blog entry 03, the curriculum will be based on the famous CS50 by Harvard. The programme is also going to be trainer-led on contrary to peer-based self-learning cohorts that Navgurukul offers. The students also get to learn and experience the world of FOSS. BWH Studios will also help them get hands-on experience with real-world projects.

Entrance Test

A good point came up during the discussion on mobilisation of candidates. If we want the best chance of success of the pilot, we need to start with students with decent logical reasoning skills and some basic English. It was decided that we would reach out to local schools like Navoday Vidhyalay, Aatmanand, Chu Lo Aasman (Dantewada), and Mata Rukmani Aashram with a pitch deck. An entrance test would be developed and conducted for interested students to test their logical reasoning skills and basic mathematics (we don’t need to test their Calculus).

Misc.

Then there were some short discussions like bringing Mathematics to Q1, having a small library of english books, assessment, and even blocking Instagram, Facebook, and Snapchat in the residential network.

The Venue

It was about lunch time and we decided to visit the 3 potential Venues that Indu ji’s team had identified after that. The first one turned out to be very remote. The second was my father’s property about 5KM from the city, where we used to live about 3 years ago. The third one’s care-taker was out of city and hence we were not able to go in, but we had a video recording of the same to make a decision. We headed back to BWH office for further discussion.

Budget Review

We continued where we left off. The elephant in the room was the excel sheet submitted by Chetna as the budget proposal a few weeks ago. I can’t disclose much of it right now but towards the end it ended up going higher 😂

Hrishi even proposed to have a small monthly “stipend” of sorts for the girls. Which makes complete sense to me.

Importance of Clean Toilets

Sunil ji brought up a very good point on the importance of hygiene and cleanliness of washrooms. He told us how at their office, washrooms must be the cleanest of all rooms.

The reason being women refrain from even drinking water for long hours just so they don’t have to use those toilets. They also have a high risk of infections due to this unclean toilets. Hire two cleaning staff if needed, but washrooms must be always cleanly maintained.

The Plot Twist

We again circled back to the venue decision. During our rides to the prospective venues, I had mentioned about “Deen Bandhu Samaj”, the runners behind some of the best schools in Jagdalpur: Nirmal Vidyalaya, Vidya Jyoti, etc. They even run a hospital: MPM (which we visited the next day).

Hrishi messaged one of his colleagues which he guessed was connected to the same place in Kerala to which the “Deen Bandhu Samaj” reports to. Luckily, his colleague’s Uncle, Fr. Kurian turned out to be one of the key persons behind these initiatives. Fr. Kurian mentioned they have a good campus where they are already running some training programmes.

He invited us to The Bishop’s house behind Nirmal Vidyalaya (my alma mater) and connected us to Fr. Sibi, in-charge of “Bastar Sevak Mandal” (BSM), a development initiative by the larger group.

He took us to the BSM campus (this was also the nearest of all prospective venues btw) and showed us the place.

We disturbed his evening Badminton game though…

It was almost ready to move in: accommodation, classes, furniture, dining hall, and more. We scheduled a meeting for early morning next day to discuss on how BSM can collaborate and were headed back to the city.

The Return

After the meeting next morning, Fr. Sibi promised to get back in a few days. Indu ji left for Raipur while Hrishi, Sunil ji and I headed to the same place for breakfast (we could not have it before the meeting since I was a bit late). After some chai pe charcha and MPM hospital visit, Sunil ji and Hrishi left for Chitrakote Waterfalls, an iconic tourist spot about 30 mins from the Jagdalpur city. Sunil ji left for Raipur from there and Hrishi got a bus back. He joined us back at our office where we worked on our own for a while before leaving for a team lunch with Hrishi!

After lunch, it was time to say goodbye (for now) and we dropped him to the Airport.

Next Steps

The proposal from Fr. Sibi has arrived. The next steps would be to take a decision on the proposal, prepare a pitch deck for the programme, and design an entrance test.

I started with two very high level questions:

• What is the end goal here?
• What should a CS17 pass out be capable of?

Now these can’t have a “fixed” skill outcome like: “proficient in MERN stack”, “good at programming in Python”, etc. The field of Computer Science is changing at a rapid pace and they should be able to self-learn and adapt. They will self-learn and adapt only when they are curious. So, if by the end of the program we are able to give them the foundations of computer science (and problem solving) and spark some curiosity for the field, they should be ready to fly.

In my opinion, a good engineer is good at figuring things out on her own, given the right direction. This will be one of my primary goals.

High Level Structure

The following sections contain the curriculum at a very level and I might shuffle or add stuff iteratively.

Q1

English communication: Read, Write, Listen, Speak. All of it is equally important.

But they can’t just be learning English for the full 3-months, they will get bored, and even might not understand the full picture. So, I plan to give them a high level overview of the programme at the very start. And sprinkles of general technology related discussed throughout.

Q2

• Understanding Technology
• Using essential software tools: terminal, docs, sheets, slides.
• Discrete Mathematics (sets, functions, etc.)
• Pillars of Programming with Scratch

Q3

• OS / Computer Architecture
• Python
• Version Control with Git/GitHub
• C

Q4

• SQL (SQLite)
• Algorithms & Data Structures
• Problem Solving (will probably use AoC puzzles a lot during this phase)
• Basic of Web Development
  • What is internet?
  • DNS
  • Protocols
  • The TCP/IP stack
  • CRUD with Flask (combine with SQL covered earlier)
• Project: Basic Web Portal

Q5

• Web Development In-depth
  • MVC
  • Core pieces of a complex web application (cache, queue, webhooks, etc.)
• Cloud Computing (basics of hosting, AWS, Cloudflare)
• Databases (a peek behind the scenes)
• Working with files and multimedia (PDFs, images, audio, text files)
• Project: Team Non-trivial Web Platform

Q6

• Frappe Framework and Apps
• Unit Testing, Integration Testing (with playwright)
• Project: Individual Capstone

Extra Classes

I plan to cover these along with the core curriculum, but they don’t have a definitive place yet.

• Use of AI / LLMs
• Meta-programming: Know your tools. Inspired by the missing semester.
• Cyber security
• Figma
• The Art of Debugging (breakpoint debugging with pdb)
• UI/UX and principles of Visual Design
• Data Analytics (useful for complex reports etc. Probably with pandas)

Raw Ideas

• An overview of Mobile and Game Development (probably guest lectures)
• Software Development Methodologies (some theory of SDLC, Agile)

Assessments

There will be Quarterly “Reviews” or assessments. This would be mostly practicals in case of the CS Curriculum.

Primary Takeaways

David walked us through the evolution of CS50 from 1999 to the present.

CS50 AP for High School

There is a CS50 AP course which has some additional components like CS50T (contains more basics like Hardware, Internet, etc.). This seems more in line with what I want CS17’s structure to be.

Sections and Office Hours

CS50 is not just the 10 or so weekly lectures we see as part of the course. There are other core components:

1. Office Hours: Dedicated time slots where Teaching Assistants (TAs) answer questions and help understand concepts.

2. Sections: Again run by TAs, topic wise lectures going more in-depth than the weekly lecture.

My plan is to have devs from BWH Studios to be the initial TAs 😁

Memorable Moments

I still remember the iconic “tear the phone book in half” moment from CS50’s first lecture. David emphasized on the use of props to add theatrics to the lectures. This also helps students build a mental model to think about concepts like searching algorithms, sorting, etc.

One of my favorite examples is using actual physical doors to demonstrate sorting algorithms:

Here are some more props that David listed:

Since CS50 lectures happen at a big scale these days, bigger props are feasible. But David pointed out that the same effect can be achieved with the use of sticky papers to hide the numbers written on board.

Accessibility, Rigor, Community

Accessibility is the reason why they start from “Scratch” and not directly a programming language. The same reason they use a cloud based IDE for the duration of the course, so the students don’t have to go through the nitty-gritty of the development environment setup. The students come from various departments and levels, so they have kept that in mind.

The students should feel that they are going through something substantial, that is why the rigor is needed.

As for the community part, they want to give the students a feeling of belonging. Not for competition, but bunch of students going together through the course.

Adapt / Adopt

They encourage adapting the CS50 core syllabus to our own situation. That is what we are doing at CS17. For example, we might want to start with Python instead of C, and take the reverse approach. Or we can break down the “keynote” lecture into smaller lectures over the week.

Both the above points are a good “adaption” to have for CS17!

Puzzle Day and Hackathon

They run a 12-hour hackathon in-person for students to build their capstone projects or work on their problem sets. The primary idea is to provide an “hacking” environment rather than the specific thing they are working on.

Puzzle day is open to all and the idea is to promote logical problem solving, which David says is the core of Computer Science.

We can probably do something similar frequently…

License

All of the CS50’s contents are licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. I have decided to license CS17 under the exact same license!

More details: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International Public License https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/

Next Steps

I will probably start by going through the handbook they have provided for the teacher.

References

• CS50T: https://cs50.harvard.edu/technology/weeks/
• CS50 Handbook: https://cs50.tf/
• CS50 Sections: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KraVJDqv7uo
• CS50 AP: https://cs50.harvard.edu/ap/curriculum
• CS50 SQL: https://cs50.harvard.edu/sql
• CS50S: https://pll.harvard.edu/course/cs50s-introduction-programming-scratch
• CS50P: https://cs50.harvard.edu/python/

I was writing a script to integrate a 3rd party service while thinking out loud. I started by writing the below snippet of code:

school_api_base = "https://school.frappe.io/api/v2"
last_month_payout = frappe.make_get_request(f"{school_api_base}/document/School Payout", params={...})

He quickly questioned my on why I have created a separate variable for the base URL? Aren’t we using it in just the next line below?

For more context, Shivam is transitioning to development (from consulting) and is almost done with CS50.

Then I explained to him the reason behind it and why in the next request we won’t have to repeat it (“DRY”), and he exclaimed “gajab!” (~ amazing). This made me realize two things:

1. I have learned so many things over time while building stuff, that seem obvious to me when I am coding these days, but might not be so obvious for the beginners.

2. How pair programming can help in conveying thought process and fast-tracking knowledge transfer!

My Pair Programming Experience

I started to think back at my time at Frappe, specially the initial few months. Pair programming sessions with Faris and debugging sessions with Aditya were the most fun and learning heavy. I could see how they made design decisions, broke down big problems, and also could ask doubts right away!

In retrospect, BWH live-streams have a similar theme, and this might be the reason people find them very helpful?

BTW wheels are in motion and I have setup a new Frappe Wiki instance for CS17 here.

Technique

One thing is for sure, Pair Programming has to be a core feature at CS17. I just don’t know at which phase of the curriculum yet.

I was excited for our field visit to Don Bosco College, Yelagiri the next morning.

Well, the story starts way before that, but let’s park it for another day.

Azim Premji Foundation x Chetna x BWH

Hrishi from Azim Premji Foundation had invited Indu Ji (founder of CCWWS) and me to visit the Don Bosco College in Yelagiri, Tamil Nadu. You might think why? Because Azim Premji Foundation is considering opening a school of programming in my hometown: Jagdalpur, offering a similar diploma course that Don Bosco used to run when they started out. Now they run 3-year degree programs like BCA and BSc.

What’s special?

Raju from Azim Premji Foundation is from Don Bosco, Yelagiri. He also joined us for the visit. He didn’t know a single word of English when he joined DBC. And now, he leads the Frappe team at Azim Premji Foundation! They have alumni all over the world. This is what we wanted to know. How were they doing it? How were they taking a lot of these rural high-school pass-outs and turning them into competent IT professionals?

We want to do something similar in Jagdalpur. Take in under-privileged children (girls to start with) from rural/tribal areas of Bastar and put them through a rigorous 18-month residential Computer Science program. One more interesting thing is that Frappe Framework will be a core part of it.

The expected outcome is quality software developers, who go on to work in the IT industry and hopefully, the social sector. Even Azim Premji Foundation is looking for Frappe developers for appointment in various parts of the nation.

The History of DBC, Yelagiri

Fr Francis Guezou, a french missionary came to India in 1952. He founded BICS InfoTech (now Don Bosco College and BoscoSoft) in 1998 to provide professional computer education to the rural and tribal youth.

I was fascinated to know how he had envisioned that the Computer Science and IT fields were going to play a prominent role in the coming years.

The Curriculum

The primary piece I was personally interested in was the Syllabus. What do they teach? How do they teach?

After a walk around the campus, the faculty team was kind enough to gather for an all-hands meeting with us. They presented to us their guiding principles and processes.

First thing that caught our attention was the English language drill which was part of their curriculum. Initially, they used to teach students only English for the first 6 months. Now they have reduced it to a few weeks, but it still continues throughout the program. Fr. Thaddeus, principal of the college, suggested us to have only English training for the first 3 months. Then it becomes part time.

We went on to dig deeper into their BCA curriculum. I also shared about CS50 by Harvard (surprisingly, not many folks had heard about it). This has been my favorite curriculum for building computation thinking.

They also mentioned about IGNOU and how earlier they provided degrees through IGNOU’s correspondence program. Probably we could do something similar.

Relatable

Inside the campus, they also run an IT services company, called BoscoSoft. Here they employ graduates from the College. They also provide internships and hands-on trainings on real-world projects. I liked how both the college and the company are tightly integrated. Fr. Thaddeus is also the CEO of BoscoSoft. They now have a suite of products and more than 200 employees!

I started imagining if BWH Studios can play the same role for our students.

Next Steps

Indu Ji (from Chetna, Raipur) is going to manage the logistics (accommodation, food, financial and more), while I am entrusted with designing a comprehensive curriculum and training the students. We are requesting Azim Premji Foundation to fund the program.

We decided that a slow-paced version of CS50 along with hands-on project building would be good to start with. As I mentioned earlier, Frappe is also going to be part of the curriculum. The Chetna team has already short-listed 40 girls from remote villages and we are going to pick out 15 from them for the pilot program. After putting a lot of thought on what to name the course, I suddenly realized that the vehicle code of Jagdalpur is CG17 and the course is inspired by CS50, hence, CS17!

I will be sharing more in the coming days.

Excited to see how this unfolds!