– Dipta Joshi (Mumbai)

Rahul Ranjan is co-founder and CEO of LeapLearner India (LLI, estb.2020) — the India partner of the Israel-based coding education company LeapLearner Inc, which has 1 million subscribers in 20 countries worldwide. Under a recently signed agreement, LLI will offer computational thinking programmes through courses in coding, robotics, apps development and logic for children in the five-14 age group. A serial edupreneur, Ranjan is also founder of edtech company Alphabyte, and two affordable Sunshine schools in Delhi NCR for underprivileged children which have 1,000 students mentored by 40 teachers on their muster rolls.

Newspeg. LeapLearner is currently working in six schools in Delhi NCR and Gujarat to design new curriculums that include coding and robotics. By the end of this year, LLI will also launch its self-learning gamified mobile app to make coding education affordable and accessible to everyone, including children from underprivileged households who don’t have access to high speed Internet and laptops.

History. A graduate of the Maulana Azad National Institute of Technology (NIT), Bhopal, and America’s top-ranked Booth School of Business of the University of Chicago, Ranjan began his career as a Java programmer with Cognizant Technologies in 2007 before taking on an assignment as a full-time primary school teacher under the Teach for India programme. In 2011, he set up KLAY Prep Schools & Day Care’s North India business as founding director.

Four years later in 2015, he signed up with the Dubai-based Varkey Group’s GEMS Education as head of business operations and established the group’s K-12 schools in Kochi, Karnal and Gurugram. The same year, he went solo and registered the Sunshine Education Foundation, a philanthropic venture for urban underprivileged children, and edtech company Alphabyte, an online learning platform to deliver computational thinking courses for primary school children. The joint venture with LeapLearner Inc enables Rahul Ranjan to offer contemporary curriculums on a globally tested platform.

Direct talk. “Coding education is not just about children being able to create apps and games. It’s about building strong computational thinking and algorithmic intelligence — CTAI — skills. A decade into the future and almost all tools used by industry will need foundational CTAI skills,” predicts Ranjan.

Future plans. Given that India hosts the world’s largest child and youth population, Ranjan believes that in the fullness of time, teaching of CTAI skills will be accorded as much importance as numeracy and literacy. “My goal is to democratise access to coding education. We are witnessing strong demand for coding education from periurban and rural markets. With the launch of our self-learning tool focussed on tier-II and III cities, we are expecting a surge in the number of sign-ups in the post-pandemic era. With NEP 2020 mandating computational thinking for all schools, the future of LLI is bright,” says Rahul Ranjan.

Way to go!

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