The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
‘For any student, anywhere in the world’
Hotchkiss soph creates education app
LAKEVILLE — Hotchkiss School sophomore Arhan Chhabra knows education is a tool everyone should have.
After a trip to India in 2018, this technology-inspired 15year-old created an online platform with a global reach to help give education to students with potential, but no resources.
And after the coronavirus pandemic hit his home country of Hong Kong earlier this year, he was further driven to continue that work, providing tutoring to anyone who needs it.
Chhabra was on spring break in Chicago in March when the coronavirus pandemic came to Connecticut. Unable to return to the school in Lakeville, he returned to his family home in Hong Kong to continue his studies, and was quarantined for two weeks. His experience was documented in a story in the New York Times.
“During my quarantine period, I brainstormed on how I could contribute to the world, and especially to students who are under stay-athome orders,” he said. “I came up with the idea of CoVidya. ... Vidya is ‘education’ in Sanskrit, and it is an online platform that provides free educa
tion to children globally, during COVID-19.
“Education has no barriers, and doesn’t need to be quarantined,” he said. “I created a website, coded and programmed it, and got tutor and student volunteers from across the globe to help support children.”
CoVidya is the second part of an educational effort that Chhabra developed last year, when he created AppVidya, to introduce online education and tutoring for economically disadvantaged children in rural India, providing them with digital tools. A story on AppVidya was reported in the South China Morning Post, the leading newspaper in Hong Kong.
Chhabra has always been interested in education and technology, and hopes one day to be an entrepreneur to further education around the world by helping disadvantaged students. “Since a young age, I’ve always been involved in charity work,” he said. “My parents put a big emphasis on that.”
In 2019, Chhabra spent time time tutoring students in a village in India. But he wanted to do more.
“As much as I loved helping them, it didn’t really change their lives, other than building their
English skills,” he said. “I wanted to develop something that would do more than that. I called companies in India, any one that had education or technology, and I joined with Byju’s, the world’s largest ed-tech company that provides tablets and software for education, and got them to help. Then I found Casp, a not-forprofit charity devoted to sponsoring education, to find students who showed the most potential.”
AppVidya provides online tutoring services to students and gives them a chance to further their education. It was taking off, Chhabra said, until the pandemic.
“Little did we know that the pandemic was going to hit the world,” Chhabra said. “I knew then that there were so many students who weren’t getting any education at all. At first I was only helping economically disadvantaged students, but I wanted to do that for everyone.”
And while he was quarantined, unable to return to his second home — the Hotchkiss School — CoVidya was born.
“With the CoVidya online platform, I’m aiming to provide free tutoring to anyone who needs it,” he said. “It’s for any student, anywhere in the world.”
Finding tutors to help CoVidya students happened quickly. “I called every friend I knew. I called the Hong Kong government, and I formed a connection with the ethnic miniorities division of the Hong Kong government for students,” Chhabra said. “I also asked people if they wanted to teach. Once I posted the story from the South China Morning Post on Reddit, I got a few hundred tutors in one go. That was a really big boost to the project.”
He was encouraged by the response.
“Having all those people sign up shows the good will of a lot of people, who are willing to give their time and help a student out,” he said. “It was really heartwarming, to see how many tutors I got.”
The tutoring program was embraced during the pandemic in Asia, and now that Asian countries are slowly coming out of quarantine, he said, the program will continue.
“If someone wants to teach something, be they a college student, a professor, all they need to do is volunteer a few hours of their time,” Chhabra said.
Chhabra is now turning his efforts to include the U.S. “The United States, Connecticut, that’s where I spend nine months of the year,” he said. “Connecticut is my home. And of course, people are stuck at home here, too, and can benefit from tutoring.”
Part of the process of providing tutoring services to students around the world is matching individuals to each other. “At first I was doing it myself, and then I developed a script online that helps with that matchmaking process, finding which student is best for each tutor,” he said. “If this gets really big, it would take a lot of manpower, but if it happens, I’ll be prepared. The script automates the process of matchmaking.”
Any student or professional who is interested in CoVidya can go to www.appvidya.com/covidya to sign up. “You can read more about the project there, too,” Chhabra said.
Chhabra said he’s doing CoVidya to help, but also to stay busy. “It gives me something to do,” he said. “It’s better than wasting time playing video games.
“I’ve always been interested in computers, coding, languages on the computer . ... I’ve always had a science-STEM background, and I’m born to a family who really values education,” he said. “I believe education is the best weapon we have. That was the motivation behind this.”
Before Hotchkiss, Chhabra attended a British school, Harrow International School Hong Kong, and lived with his mother, Sonu Govil, and father, Amit Chhabra. For the last three summers, he has taken a few courses: an advanced physics program at Johns Hopkins University as part of its Center for Talented Youth program, where he was selected based on an international talent search and his math scores. In 2018, he attended a coding and robotics program at Duke University as part of the school’s Talent Identification Program. And in 2019, he was accepted to a math program at Northwestern University as part of its Center for Talent Development program.
“This summer I’m virtually attending LaunchX, an entrepreneurial program where I will be starting my own start-up company,” he said. “I’ll be back at Hotchkiss in the fall.”
At Hotchkiss, Chhabra is an editor and writer for the school newspaper, and enjoys debates. He’s also a tennis player, a drummer, and likes movies. But his great passion, he said, is education technology.
“I”m using everything I know to help others,” he said. “I never took a coding course, but I’m goign to take one at Hotchkiss this year. Otherwise, it’s just been self-learning, as well as the course I took at Duke.”
An outsider might think Chhabra is already on his way to a new career, but he’s undecided for now.
“It’ll be something in the field of STEM,” he said. “Right now I’m focused on this. For the long term, I’d like to continue with entrepreneurial technology. But I don’t have a specific plan.”
Visit www.appvidya.com/ covidya to learn more about the project.