Anu-Kram wins Rep. Anthony D’Esposito’s 2023 Congressional App Challenge in New York’s Fourth District

When asked what inspired the creation of Anu-Kram, the student said, “I spent last summer grinding away at global history textbooks, spending endless hours with the aim of acing my New York State Regents. But what was frustrating was having to navigate my way through the plethora of documents, assignments, announcements, quizzes, and materials that my teacher had uploaded somewhat haphazardly. The amount of time I spent learning was dwarfed by the amount of time I spent searching through our Google Classroom, the platform on which my teacher had uploaded everything she had taught during the year.

There was no methodology, no organization, no way of quickly searching through the reams of data that seemed to inhabit Google Classroom. If Google’s founding ambition had been to organize the world’s data, I wondered why they hadn’t created a product for more than 150 million users of Google Classroom! These were users who were using the software for several hours every day, and yet, there was no taxonomy, classification standards, searchability, indexes,nothing! This was a dark, pre-taxonomy Darwinian wasteland!

Each Google Classroom (e.g., Statistics and Chemistry) were similarly bloated. I railed against the amount of time I was wasting, and a system that was so patently inefficient. An entire year’s worth of knowledge lay in a medieval, non-archival state of being, an inscrutable jungle of information at best.

This brief, month-long experience was the catalyst that led me to develop Anu-kram. Roughly translated, Anukram is ancient Sanskrit for go through in order, enumerate, supply with an abstract or index. I’d been reading about indexes during the school year, I’d studied search engines in my research class. Additionally, two of my other research projects involved creating AI coding solutions.

I was convinced that a common platform which could provide real-time indexation, organization, and search capabilities, and which could integrate AI with (i) instruction material (ii) teacher’s assignments (iii) textbooks (iv)  teachers’ notes & announcements and (V) students’ notes on one common app could provide a formidable solution, and which would be of great utility to 150 million students! In time, I could create self-generating customized practice tests, integrate students’ calendars, and enable virtual collaboration between students and their study groups.

This was a fascinating, real-life problem with tremendous applications, and with possibilities to become a successful, at-scale solution. I knew I had no choice but to build this project!”