In 2016, Ananya Chadha was just a regular 14-year-old girl struggling to fit in at her high school in Toronto. She often had sci-fi-inspired fantasies about building futuristic technologies like jet-pack shoes, going so far as to look into where she could buy parts. Then one day two brothers, Navid and Nadeem Nathoo, came to her school and described a new type of educational program they started called The Knowledge Society , or TKS. “They talked about essentially creating the next Elon Musk,” recalls Chadha, now 18 years old. “When they talked about taking crazy ideas and unconventional paths and making it real, I was like ‘Wow, I need this.’” It would sound like a rip-off of a classic superhero story if it weren’t completely true: ordinary teenagers being recruited into an elite program designed to give them the power to do extraordinary things, and maybe even save the world. While many programs like Code for America and the Flatiron School focus on teaching entrepreneurship or tech skills to high school students, TKS, which was founded in 2016, is unique for giving students both the hard skills they need to build next-generation solutions to some of the world’s biggest problems as well as the soft skills they need to communicate and create them. Ananya Chadha at TKShowcase [Photo: courtesy of TKS] Soon after enrolling in the program, Chadha was working in a gene-editing lab, where she discovered a problem with the homogeny of samples used in data sets. That inspired her to develop a blockchain-based application that compensates users for uploading anonymous genetic information to help diversify the data pool. After the app, G-gnome, was acquired by a blockchain startup, she switched her focus to computer-human interfaces. In 2018 Chadha secured a sponsorship from Microsoft to build a remote control car that she can control by meditating . Today she interns for IBM. “What I found unique was their ability to connect advances in bleeding-edge technologies to tackle hard problems our society faces on daily basis,” says Piotr Mierzejewski, the director of Db2 deployment for IBM Data and AI. “These young minds don’t seem to be discouraged by how hard and complex problems they are trying to solve are; they simply face the challenge to find solutions.” In recent months Chadha has presented her work at some of the biggest technology conferences in the world, she was named to the 2019 class of Canada’s Developer 30-Under-30 , and she won First Prize in engineering.com’s Impossible Science Challenge. Chadha, however, is just one of almost 400 students who have achieved incredible feats after enrolling in TKS. Building the next Elon Musk After the Nathoos spent three years developing the program in Toronto and Waterloo, TKS is expanding to New York, Boston, Las Vegas, and Ottawa in the fall— enrolling 80 students in each new chapter—and offering a new program in Toronto for students as young as nine. Navid and Nadeem-Natho [Photo: courtesy of TKS] “The whole reason why we’re scaling is because I strongly believe that we are not short on human potential,” says Navid Nathoo.
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How this program turns ordinary teens into tech superheroes