This 14-year-old's virtual classroom app won the IIT Roorkee app innovation challenge. Here's why

Fourteen-year-old Aritra Neogi, Class IX student of Kendriya Vidyalaya (AFS), Barrackpore West Bengal has won the IIT Roorkee's E-Summit'21 App Innovation Challenge for his app named 'Yesmam - Realtime Classroom'. Aritra's app facilitates virtual classroom education through faster interaction between teachers and students.

He received a certificate from IIT Roorkee along with Codingal Merchandise. IIT Roorkee organised this competition a few weeks ago in partnership with Codingal, an online coding platform for K-12 (school) students.

Manas Hejmadi (St Paul's English School, Bengaluru) and Lakshay Kumar (Jiva Public School, Faridabad) of classes XI and XII were first and second runners up respectively. Manas developed 'TrashTag', an app that uses QR codes to incentivize garbage disposal, while Lakshay developed 'Neorky', an app to help unemployed people find short-term jobs or projects nearby.

IIT Roorkee spokesperson, Bharat Nittala, Convener, E-Summit said, "We are happy to provide this platform for learning and applying coding skills to young inquisitive minds in partnership with Codingal. Learning coding at a younger age can help inculcate highly valuable problem solving and analytical skills in children. Done the right way, it can be a valuable skill with lifelong benefits for school children."

The IIT Roorkee App Innovation Challenge was open to students from Grade 8 to 12. Students had to build apps on one of the following themes: agriculture, education, healthcare, sanitization and environment. 400+ students from all over India registered for the competition. All students also received mentoring from Vivek Prakash (IIT Roorkee alumnus) and Satyam Baranwal (IIT Dhanbad alumnus), the Co-founders of Codingal to guide them and give feedback on their ideas and design. Further, professional coding teachers from Codingal also hosted a 1-hour masterclass on app development for all students.

Codingal's Co-founder and CEO Vivek Prakash said, "Our primary goal with this competition was to encourage school students to learn to code, build apps and websites which encourages them to think of solving world problems like sanitization, democratizing education, and cleaner environment. This is unlike anything they study in school and it expands their horizon and capabilities. We are absolutely thrilled to see not only the quality of apps submitted but also the enthusiastic response that this competition has received from school students. We are now looking forward to organising hundreds of such competitions in the future."

Lakshay Kumar wrote, "On the result day when I was declared as 2nd runner up in the competition, I was overwhelmed with joy. I shared this app along with this good news with my fellow-mates and teachers. This good news went viral in the entire school. I am really thankful to Codingal for bringing such an amazing competition to me."

Codingal is the #1 online coding platform for K-12 (school) students, with a mission to inspire them to fall in love with coding at a young age. Launched in September 2020, Codingal has already empowered over 40,000 kids by motivating them to start learning coding via competitions and delivering quality coding education with all-star teachers - only from a Computer Science background.

Codingal has developed the world's first coding curriculum with BIDE Model (Broad, inspiring, Deep, Efficient), integrated with Bloom's Taxonomy and a dedicated focus on STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Maths) learning methodology. School kids love the Codingal platform for its teachers, curriculum, and competitions.