We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Ajay a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Ajay, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. We’d love to hear the story of how you went from this being just an idea to making it into something real.

We, the co-founders of CodeSparkClubs, realized that a big issue lay within starting an AI club: people didn’t have the resources to actually start the club. As such, we stepped in to make the process of starting an AI club easier than ever. Each and every one of our materials were created by us, and we have expanded our material selection as our numbers got larger. At first, we settled with only slideshows, but we soon added projects, newsletters, and hackathon event guides that AI club leaders could rely on, and through feedback, we were able to refine what we created to make it even better. As time went on, our club materials started reaching people from different states, countries, and continents, and we have increased AI literacy across the globe. Within a year, what started as a simple idea to make club materials to help AI clubs grow led to the increase in AI literacy in over 90 schools and 7 countries.

Ajay, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

The juniors at Independence High School (Sriram Polineni, Ajay Aravanan, Armaan Gugnani) who founded CodeSparkClubs are passionate about promoting and advancing AI literacy worldwide. Our love of technology led us to pursue this career path. We created CodeSparkClubs in response to a problem that emerged in this industry. Engaging AI resources that are ready to use and include projects designed to support the main ideas discussed in the lectures are provided by CodeSparkClubs. We also provide event guidelines to assist users develop and use their AI talents in the real world. We provide a solution to the accessibility problem: anyone can access our excellent resources with a single click, allowing AI club leaders to focus on helping people rather than handling logistics. What makes us unique is that our resources are knowledge-rich, user-friendly, and free, which makes it easier to get started in the AI space. We’re delighted to report that this concept has been a huge success, reaching an astounding 90+ schools in 7 countries and influencing over 2,000 children. We want everyone to know that we are here to make the process of launching an AI club as simple as possible.

Is there mission driving your creative journey?

Our mission is to enable high school students to investigate and influence the direction of computer science and artificial intelligence and to make it simple for students to start and manage their own tech club and to remove obstacles to education so that students can concentrate on the important things, like creating projects, encouraging teamwork, and developing the self-assurance to participate in hackathons or go after more ambitious ideas. Our primary goal is to provide young innovators with the resources and support they need to transform their curiosity into creativity.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

We spent more than 100 hours developing presentations, project guides, and newsletters in the early days of CodeSparkClubs in the hopes that students everywhere would embrace them right away. Progress was sluggish during those initial months, though, and it seemed that fewer students were being reached by our efforts than we had anticipated.

Rather than halting, we intensified our efforts. To ensure that people knew the resources were available and free, we put in hundreds of extra hours contacting students, advertising CodeSparkClubs on social media, and honing our strategy. The momentum started to build gradually but steadily. Our influence increased tenfold in a matter of months. All of those long nights and weekends were worthwhile when we saw students start clubs, conduct meetings using our supplies, and collaborate on projects.

That experience served as a reminder to us founders of the value of resilience. We were able to transform an initial struggle into a breakthrough moment for CodeSparkClubs by remaining dedicated to our mission, even though the results were not immediate.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://codesparkclubs.github.io
• Instagram: https://instagram.com/codesparkclubs
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/codesparkclubs/about/

Image Credits

In the personal group photo, Armaan is on the left, Sriram is in the middle, and Ajay is on the right