Our founding story

I grew up in Nepal in a lower-middle-class family, set to inherit our small family business. In middle school, I was lucky enough to get time on a computer. This was the mid-1980s, at my boarding school in the rural town of Pilani, India. The school had just received two Tandy 1000 series computers from an alumni donor. We had no computer science teacher, so our vice principal decided to learn the subject himself, and I got to join his pilot lessons. We learned PC DOS, WordStar, and BASIC, and I was thrilled. It changed my life.

For my junior and senior years of high school, I went to a school in New Delhi. Its computer lab had 6 IBM-PC XT and AT computers. On a school visit to HCL-HP, a software company, I learned for the first time what a career in computer science looks like. That visit shaped my decision to earn a bachelor's degree in computer science. It opened doors I'd never dreamed of. It brought me to America as an immigrant worker and, later, to Google, where I got to work alongside some of the brightest minds.

In the summer of 2020, the pandemic kept us at home, and school and activities moved online. My son, a rising high school junior, had his summer internship canceled and didn't know what to do. That's when I realized he had never taken a single programming lesson. Yet he had more computing devices at home than my entire school had shared in the 1990s.

I asked him to take an online computer science course on one of the many MOOC platforms, but he hesitated. Some of his classmates had been programming for years, and he felt it was too late to start. He also thought it would be hard, so he looked for excuses, like "I'm not as interested in computer science."

So we dove in together. We came up with a summer project that appealed to his maker instincts, and within a couple of weeks of mentoring, he was writing fluent Python. Over the next six months, he learned Java, HTML, and CSS. He even planned to turn the project into a product he could sell.

I wondered why my son and so many of his classmates hadn't learned to program in school. When I looked into computer science education in the US, the numbers were troubling. There aren't enough computer science teachers, even though the subject is as fundamental as math and science to socioeconomic mobility in every industry. The gap is widest for students of color, girls, and other underserved students across the country.

That experience got me thinking about building the most inclusive and accessible school in the world for high-quality computer science courses. It would combine the reach of MOOCs with the effectiveness of teacher-led classes.

After several years of teaching computer science at partner schools, I saw that the tools and curricula had to get better at supporting teachers and students. Alps grew out of that experience.

If you teach, I invite you to try Alps.