School-focused Computer Science & Coding Curriculum

✨ My Journey at Tekie

It was a true 0→1 journey that demanded I wear every hat. One day, I was shaping the product roadmap with leadership; the next, I was directing animation shots; the day after, I was in a school gathering direct product feedback. This constant switch between high-level strategy and deep, hands-on craft was the norm and it's where I thrive.

To get a sense of what made Tekie stand out, take a glimpse:

💻 Product Design & Strategy: From After-School to B2B Ecosystem

Tekie began as an after-school B2C platform where kids learned to code through our animated series. The platform was a complete learning environment, featuring an in-built IDE, a gamified quiz system, and personalized homework. A key differentiator was our 'mentor' model, pairing students with energetic college mentors who made the experience feel personal and cool.

But our mission evolved: we saw a bigger opportunity not just in teaching coding, but in fundamentally changing how it was taught in schools. This B2B pivot required us to rethink everything and design a product offering compelling enough for a school to replace its entire curriculum that it had been following for YEARS! Our answer was a complete learning ecosystem: a holistic offering of platform, content, and support that was too valuable to ignore.

On the product side, our mission was clear: deliver a seamless, gamified platform for students, and an incredibly intuitive, burden-free app for teachers. During our pilot, we constantly did school visits, observing classes, taking notes, and often shipping changes the very next day. I was also hands-on personally training teachers and students on how to use our app. This direct interaction was invaluable, revealing nuanced edge cases we would have never discovered sitting in an office.

The result? Our pilot was very successful: 60+ schools and over 25k paid students ($260k+ ARR). Eventually, this user-first approach became the engine for our growth, directly contributing to a 90%+ school retention rate in our first year of operations.

🧑‍🎓 Student Learning Platform

To keep students engaged in learning, we designed a single, cohesive platform where they could learn, practice, and collaborate without ever leaving it. This all-in-one, gamified experience was built around a core set of features:

• A Personalized Dashboard synced with live class activities
• Interactive Courses featuring our animated videos, quizzes, and slides
• Homework & Streaks System to build consistent habits
• In-built "Code Garage" Sandbox with multi-language support
• Collaborative Student Community for peer-to-peer learning
• Direct integration with tools like Figma, Canva, and Scratch
• In-platform access to our E-textbooks and "Cheat Sheets"

To make it exciting for students, we sprinkled hints of our IP universe throughout the platform. Characters appeared on badges and thumbnails, and our content team even wrote them into quiz questions. It was a simple way to infuse our brand in the product in non-obvious ways, making the whole world feel connected.

This user-centric approach was a huge success, resulting in a student NPS score of over 90%.

👩‍🏫 Teacher App

From our classroom visits, we learned that teachers' biggest pain point is the sheer volume of administrative work: from grading papers and handling submissions to class preparation. Introducing a new digital curriculum could easily add to that burden.

Our goal was to design a teacher app that solved this. We envisioned a powerful, live classroom command center that would be incredibly easy to use while actively reducing their existing workload. We also knew every teacher has a unique style, so we designed this toolset to empower, and not constrain them. This empathetic, teacher-first approach was essential for successfully onboarding and supporting over 2,000 new teachers as we scaled.

Key features included:

• A Real-time Dashboard to track student progress and spot issues during a live class
• Automated Attendance & Grading to eliminate time-consuming admin tasks
• Curriculum & Lesson Planning tools for efficient class preparation
• An integrated Resource Hub with teacher manuals, question banks, and onboarding materials
• Auto-generated Reports for seamless communication with school leadership

💙 Brand & Marketing

To stand out in the crowded ed-tech space, I built the Tekie brand identity to have a vibrant and trustworthy visual language, using our IP's universe as the foundation.

This identity was applied across all touchpoints, from our marketing website, BTL activities and social campaigns to the creative direction for our high-budget ad films, which I led. For many schools, co-branding with Tekie became a badge of honor and a way to signal their leadership and commitment to future-forward tech education to their parents.

Ultimately, my goal for anyone touching the Tekie brand was to understand our core promise: that through storytelling and a very hands-on approach, we were teaching new-age skills for the future.

🎨 Creative Direction & IP Development

🦸‍♂️ Our Animated Series

The animated series was the heart of Tekie. The strategy was to make coding approachable and fun by bringing it to life through a universe of memorable characters. This was the cornerstone of our brand and was a core differentiator that made the entire product instantly more engaging. With the plot from our content team as the foundation, my challenge was to translate their narrative into a compelling visual world.

For the pilot episodes, my role was deeply hands-on with the craft. I led the creative benchmarking across the board: from designing assets and animating key shots to defining the visual and motion language for explaining technical concepts.

This foundational work set the standard for the full series, where I then guided our team of 30+ in-house artists through the entire production pipeline: from pre-production and character design to direction, music, and post-production.

To achieve a world-class standard, we also partnered with one of India’s top animation studios (worked on Wolverine) and collaborated with artists from acclaimed projects like Rick & Morty and Ubisoft.

📚 Coding Textbooks for grades 1-10:

We challenged the idea that textbooks had to be boring and dense with text. Building on our animated series, we created a first-of-its-kind line of NEP-compliant, comic-style coding textbooks that used storytelling to make technical concepts genuinely fun.

I led the project from prototyping and testing with schools, to setting the design benchmarks for readability and engagement. This was a high-stakes, high-velocity push: we had to write and publish 16 distinct CS & Coding books in just 3 months to hit the seasonal sales window and enable our first year of operations. I managed a team of over 10 illustrators, and together with our content team, we infused our character universe into the curriculum. Our goal was to make the story exciting while keeping the technical content digestible.

I also designed the packaging to build excitement before the book was even opened. The students' reactions proved our approach worked and they genuinely loved it!

You can check out our CS Textbook for Grade 6 here.

⛳ Fin.

Tekie was a five-year marathon with countless people. I’m grateful to everyone involved in the journey, it shaped who I am today.

I had the rare opportunity to see a company through its full lifecycle: joining as an intern straight out of high school, growing into a founding member and Design Head, navigating a major B2B pivot, and ultimately seeing it through to a successful acquisition.

Below are some BTS moments and extras. Let's chat if you'd like to hear more!