Shanya Gill on TIME’s Kid of the Year Honoree List: It’s an honour

96" height="457" /> Arjun Sharda[/caption]

Arjun is happy about the early milestones of TLEEM. For helping K12 students build a learning network at an early age, his venture has received a $500 USD donation from the Salice Family Foundation. “This contribution will support our future programs and general operating costs. We are incredibly thankful for this generous donation,” remarks the teenager who has spoken at events like DevOpsDays Austin and DevelopersWeek as one of the youngest speakers.

Turning passion into social entrepreneurship

With TLEEM, Arjun aims to empower students to develop skills that schools might not teach by creating a learning network. “We're tomorrow. We're the next leaders and CEOs. If someone has a burning passion for something, they should be able to follow it, regardless of age. And I think that networking plays a big role in being able to follow it,” he remarks.

From a young age, Arjun developed a keen interest in technology, leadership, entrepreneurship, engineering, and math. He started coding at the age of seven and has since developed expertise in Python, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, TypeScript, and Java, contributing to various open-source projects available on platforms like GitHub. Some of his significant projects include Searchor, TimeConv, and Passeo. “These are being used by businesses and individuals,” he shares, adding, “I also attended an engineering class and participated in a gifted program called PACE Math where seventh-grade students studied eighth-grade mathematics.”

[caption id="attachment_38384" align="aligncenter" width="372"] Arjun Sharda[/caption]

However, his school did not have a club that supported his multidisciplinary interests. Determined to pursue his passions, Arjun founded a school club and named it TLEEM. In this endeavour, he received support not only from his schoolmates but also from teachers and the assistant principal of his school.

Creating milestones

When Arjun and his friends started posting about TLEEM’S activities on online forums, they were delighted to receive interest from youngsters in other parts of the globe and within a short frame of time TLEEM grew into an organisation with 15 chapters across seven countries. “We have chapters in countries like Morocco, Indonesia, Croatia, Slovakia, India, and the USA,” Arjun says. TLEEM provides options for two types of chapters - school chapters and community chapters. 

[caption id="attachment_38385" align="aligncenter" width="727"] Arjun Sharda[/caption]

Interspersing love for technology, marketing and writing

Apart from his deep interest in technology, it was curiosity that led Arjun to self-publish the book, ‘'The Salesperson's Direction to Clients' which is his personal analysis of the sales data of companies such as Apple and Google.

“While searching for a new phone online, I got curious about how big companies like Apple, Google, and Samsung sell their products. For example, how does Apple manage to sell iPhones for $1,000 and make a fortune, even though Google's Pixel or Samsung smartphones might have better technical specifications for the same price or even cheaper?” he remarks.

Intrigued, he researched and found interesting information about Apple's marketing strategies. For instance, a simple design and easy-to-use interface attract more customers, even if another phone brand has better technical specifications, as customers want comfort. “I wrote a short book about my findings and published it in April 2023, using Amazon KDP and Draft2Digital, LLC. I was just 11 at that time,” he says.

[caption id="attachment_38386" align="aligncenter" width="446"] Arjun Sharda[/caption]

Support from family

Happy about his accomplishments and TLEEM’s growth, Arjun thanks his mother for being a significant contributor, especially with the paperwork required to make TLEEM a registered 501(c)(3) organisation.

Born in Santa Clara, California, Arjun lives with his parents in Austin, Texas. “My parents are from Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan and moved to the United States in 2008. I have an intelligent and loving brother, Arin, who will be turning four in a few days,” says the youngster, who is also a contributor to GREY Journal and the editor-in-chief of Generation Insider magazine.

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says Arushi, in an interview with Global Indian. Academically, she had long since surpassed her school work, and wanted to spend her time taking deep dives into the subjects she loved most – math, coding and astronomy. Her parents – her father is an environmentalist and her mother a writer – supported their daughter fully and when Arushi was six, her dad drove her to her first ever hackathon.

[caption id="attachment_34734" align="aligncenter" width="485"] Arushi Nath, winner of the Best Project award at the Canada-Wide Science Fair 2023[/caption]

The hackathon veteran

This was 2014 and Arushi was the youngest competitor there, by far. NASA's Curiosity rover had just landed on Mars and Arushi was "so fascinated by the idea of being able to land and control something on a whole other planet," she smiles. So, at the hackathon, she and her team made a little robot that could identify obstacles and avoid them. Very complex work for a six-year-old - "We created the physical structure, then coded it," Arushi explains. The robot's ultrasonic sensor could detect obstacles and avoid them. And all this was possible because Arushi had already familiarised herself with Arduino - an open-source electronic prototyping platform that allows users to create interactive electronic objects.

As far as Arushi was concerned, doing projects was the best way to learn. She also wanted to bring her scientific acumen together with the things she cared about. So, in 2018, when she and her friends attended the School Strike for Climate started by Swedish Climate activist Greta Thunberg, Arushi wanted to do more “than raise slogans or wait for others to act,” she said.

S.N.A.C.K.

This led to her designing ‘Schools and NASA Aiding Climate Action by Kids’, which  comes with the catchy abbreviation, ‘S.N.A.C.K.’. The project uses satellite imagery to calculate tree densities of schools in Toronto, than ranks and maps them. She also designed a pollution sensor to measure levels in parks and schools across the city, using Arduino, the open source electronics platform that lets users create interactive models. “I wanted school children to come up with local solutions to global challenges,” she says.

Her efforts resulted in her being named the NASA SpaceApps Global Nominee – she had already won the Space Apps Challenge in 2014 and again in 2018. In fact, by the age of 10, she had been at a jaw-dropping 29 hackathons. This was a special win, though, she says, of S.N.A.C.K, as it was her first solo attempt. ” I had to do all the work myself, from thinking of the idea, making it, coding and presenting it to the judges in 40 hours.”

The dragonfly drone

As far as Arushi was concerned, doing projects was the best way to learn. During the Covid-19, she began work on her first major endeavour – building a drone – quite a feat for the young scientist, who was only 10 years old at the time. The idea for the directional dragonfly drone was born during the COVID-19 lockdown. Disturbed by the news of locusts devastating crops in Asia and Africa, Arushi saw an opportunity to make a difference. "These locusts often travel in large swarms, are very fast, and can change direction unpredictably," the Global Indian explained, underlining the urgency of the problem.

Arushi's solution was to use drones for locust control, "as they can fly, follow the locusts, and monitor their behavior," she explains. She also wanted to biomimic nature, choosing the dragonfly because it is by far the most efficient hunter, with a 95 percent success rate in catching prey (in comparison, the success rate of lions is 25 percent and sharks have a 50 percent chance of success). "I made a protoype using a soda can, a motor and a distance sensor I created on Arduino," Arushi says. When she returned from the Ellehacks hackathon, she refined her model, using lego pieces to create a drone "I programmed it to identify all red objects as locusts," she said, describing the functionality of her creation.

The planetary defense system

Given her involvement with the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada, her prowess with Python and her love for Maths, Arushi was casting around for a way to bring all her passions together. That's how she the idea for planetary defense against unknown asteroids was born. She had learned about robotic telescopes through the RASC and utilised images from these devices – “I took images from robotic telescopes in Canada, Spain, the US, and Australia to get full sky coverage," Arushi explains. She had to sift through these to pinpoint the unknown asteroids, using the Gaia Star Catalogue for information on star positions, and the NASA Horizon dataset, for predictions on the locations of known asteroids. Then, using her coding and math skills, she developed an algorithm to filter out known entities - “I created custom masks to remove all these objects, leaving me with the unknown objects," she explains.

She couldn’t always go it alone, though, often turning to online forums for help. "When I got some errors, I would try for days, even weeks, on my own to find the answer, but if not, I would reach out to specific forums," she says. She also reached out to experts, including Christina Thomas, the lead investigator on NASA’s DART mission. “"I sent her a message, told her about my current project, and asked if I could have a Zoom meeting to talk to her about her project and how it could relate to mine," Arushi smiles. Thomas responded and the two did get on that Zoom meeting. "I actually asked her for pointers on my project and what I could do," she adds.

Finding acclaim

[caption id="attachment_34735" align="aligncenter" width="594"] Arushi receiving her award at the Canada-Wide Science Fair 2023[/caption]

“The whole thing took about ten months to complete,” Arushi says, Her goals changed along the way, so much so that her first goal and the end result were very different.” Finally, her findings were sent to the Minor Planet Center database. Then came waiting for a response. “A couple of weeks later, I got an email and three of the asteroids had my name next to them,” Arushi smiles. She submitted her project to the Toronto Science Fair and won gold, qualifying for the prestigious Canada-Wide Science Fair, where she also went on to win. “I was watching the results with my family and wasn’t expecting my name to pop up again but it did,” she says.

Now, Arushi is continuing work on her planetary defense project. Now that the DART Mission has successfully entered the Didymos (asteroid) system, she wants to measure the changes of the system during this impact. "I began studying the Didymos binary system for a copule of months before the DART impact," she says, "To fully understand how it has been affected."

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