The modest childhood and longing to be rich made Irfan Lalani pursue a multinational company after completing Mechanical Engineering from Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, Gujarat, India. In a span of two years, he started looking for the challenges that were larger than him which can make him even more passionate about his work and gives him an opportunity to contribute to the society.
His experience of, volunteering with NGOs in Baroda and Pune, teaching kids from low income background overwhelmed him and decided to do fellowship at Teach For India, a movement to bring in education equity in India. He started teaching grade 3 kids in a low income private school focusing on bridging the academic gap and going beyond, by inculcating values and giving exposure about the world around, so as to set them on a different life path. As a teacher, each day would be cycle of challenges, failures, success, anger, laughter, despair and hope in giving the best to the kids so their birth place neither decides their future nor curbs their dreams of flying high.
After realizing the need of shift from complete out dated knowledge based computer curriculum where the kids would just memorize the content to a curriculum which gives them the combination of skills and updated knowledge, he started researching about computer curriculum in India and abroad. He was surprised to see the amount of progress countries like Finland, US and UK have made regarding teaching computer science to primary kids in schools. The benefits of teaching computer programming such as improving critical thinking, inculcating creativity and growth mind set inspired him to bring world of coding to his kids. The fun of learning programming in high school and college, and experience of coding at work enabled him to teach kids coding by engaging them in various academic, value based and community related projects.
He twice led the participation of school in the Hour of Code event and has also conducted Hour of Code event and introductory coding sessions for kids and teachers for more than 7 schools and hopes to go beyond.