People are immersed in Silicon Valley: the center of technological start-ups, a world of fast-paced innovation and entrepreneurial networks. But spreading the knowledge and influence to thousands in need is no small feat. Through founding the App Development League (ADL), Krish Maniar (11) executed his goal to provide computer science education to underprivileged students through events, programs and mentorship.

“Especially living in a community like Harker, where we all have resources at our hands, it’s really important for us to give back to the community,” Krish said. “Helping people who don’t have resources [is] really meaningful to me.”

With the initial idea of the App Development League in mind, Krish took six months of extensive organization and communication to prepare ADL for its launch in the summer of 2020.

“In the beginning, I had to email hundreds of schools, develop [the] curriculum, and teach five to six hours a week during the summer because I was teaching many different classes, and it was just me,” Krish said. “Getting students to attend [was] another [obstacle]. We were pretty fortunate to have partnerships at local schools to get a lot of their students.”

With the organization up and running, the App Development League team introduced a number of virtual programs and events to the community. These included STAR; an initiative to connect with underprivileged schools by offering free resources, curriculums, and classes; CAMP, a community app management and development class helping other non-profit organizations make an impact through creating their own websites; and MEET, a mentorship program. 

The team then created different sections of the organization, each led by a director. As the Director of the Mentorship Program, Aniketh Tummala (10) organizes the pairing of mentors with students, through which officers tutor their mentees based on specific areas of interest such as artificial intelligence and website development.

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Provided by Krish Maniar

Founder and chief executive officer of App Dev League Krish Maniar (11) and director Aniketh Tummala (10) teach sorting algorithms over Zoom. App Dev League hopes to spread access to computer science in the community.

“Next semester, we’re also looking to expand to different difficulty levels and also an introduction to competitive coding,” Aniketh said.

The marketing team, led by sophomore Desiree Luo (10), focuses on expanding the influence of ADL online through social media posts, videos and blog write-ups. As the Director of Outreach, she assigns various tasks to the team members, including brainstorming social media schedules and designing posts.

“I delegate tasks to people, so I create a posting schedule for Instagram because we post about our upcoming events and opportunities that we have to get involved with,” Desiree said. “I sometimes design posts myself, too. I also run the blog page on Medium.”

After the onset of the pandemic, the officers realized they needed to adapt many aspects of the project to an online environment.

“My main goal was to make this an in-person [organization and] have a presence in different schools and all,” Krish said. “One obstacle [was] adapting to the whole online environment, which worked pretty well for us, but it was definitely still a struggle.”

Despite the challenges presented by the pandemic and the unusual virtual situation, the team adapted and worked together to launch their biggest event: the Appathon. The event, an entirely virtual conference with expert speakers and a business pitch ideation competition, was one of their proudest achievements.

“We have really good teamwork,” Desiree said. “[The Appathon] was online and it had over 300 attendees and a lot of important speakers. That was when I realized the scope of the organization. It’s really impressive that a non-profit organization run by high school students can reach so many people and that we can work together to create that.”

Putting in effort to ensure a memorable experience and to make an impact on their community, the App Development League brings students together through their mission:  inspire their students to use what they learn and create apps that will change their own communities for the better.

“[We] enable students to make impacts in their communities with these different apps,” Krish said. “We’ve had many students create apps that have gone public in their communities, which has been really impactful. Something unique that we do is we really try to teach students to develop these end products.”