CHENNAI: The Pycon India Tech Conference is a global tech conference that happens every year across different countries and is almost like a dreamland for techies. A few months ago, when it was held in Hyderabad, Anitha Raman, a Bengaluru-based start-up owner, who has her roots in Thoothukudi, for the first time co-hosted the workshop for kids, unveiling projects of her three-year-old start-up codePannu to a global crowd.
“The conference was a great networking place for professionals. They had a special track for kids to motivate them to pick the right kind of subjects and channel their curiosity. I was selected as the co-host for one of the events. We came up with both simple and advanced projects for kids,” she says.
Techie turned trainer
From working in a multinational company to opting for freelancing and coming up with a start-up, Anitha has experimented throughout her 16-year career journey. During the initial days of her work, after completing her BA in Computer Science, the techie ventured into data science and advanced analytics. She also started training freshers who have difficulty finding a job with tech education. “I used to simplify things and ask them to practise under my guidance. I understood how difficult it is for them to find a job and it is much easier to be recruited if they had an experienced person guiding them.”
It was during the pandemic that the idea of codePannu became a reality. “When Covid hit, many companies came up with online classes. But most of them weren’t breaking it down in a simpler way and making it affordable. If we aren’t providing quality education then coding and other tech education will only be seen just as a marketing tool. With codePannu, our objective is to give quality education. However different the kid’s learning ability is, they will be able to pick up. We are simplifying things and making it affordable. If kids are going to get tech education from the school, they will get clarity on what course they want to take in college. We aim to make everything easy, fun, and affordable,” shares Anitha.
A global project
The start-up has kids from 30 countries and trainers are from countries like USA, Canada, Europe, and so on. Anitha says, “We operate under five zones. The USA and Canada are under one zone. East Asia is another. Then we have Europe, the Middle East, and a zone including countries like India and Sri Lanka. The reason we split is to manage the timing. All my trainers work remotely. We have 18 trainers teaching both non-programming and programming sectors and others running operations, finance, marketing, instructional design, etc. We have a total of 35 members in the team.”
After the pandemic, the team reported that their revenue dropped by almost 50 percent. Anitha shares, “After schools reopened, children in India came back to their homes only by 5 pm or so and we didn’t want to take classes after that because they would be tired. The only way we could sustain the company was from other countries. But the slow pace helped us set up a lot of things like training the teachers and stabilising everything else.”
Tech education is expensive and is unaffordable for many kids. They might not have the infrastructure — laptop and internet — needed to study programming. codePannu makes the courses a monthly package as it will be easier for the kids and the parents. Anitha says, “Our course fees are from Rs 1,600-Rs 2,000 in India. There will be almost eight sessions in a month. In India, we give a subsidised rate and we do batch courses. It goes on for seven months. Even though it is hard for us to track payment each month, we don’t want to switch to annual payment as this scheme benefits the parents.”
To democratise coding and take it to all segments of society, codePannu aspires to reach more people. Sharing the plans, Anitha says, “We will continue to make tech education affordable. We have trainers teaching Python, Java, SQL, etc and we will expand it further. Kids from rural areas of Tamil Nadu and Rajasthan are reaching out; we plan to make it more accessible for everyone.”
For details, visit www.codepannu.com