Is a GitHub portfolio actually worth anything for a school-age student?
It is worth more than it was, for a specific reason: grades compress and links do not. Two candidates with near-identical transcripts are hard to separate, and a reader who can open a repository, see commits dated across months and read an honest note about the model's limits has something to go on. It is not a substitute for results and we would never claim that. It is the thing that distinguishes between people whose results already look the same.
My child is twelve. Should they be publishing code publicly?
With supervision, and with a few rules we apply from the start. No personal information in the repository, no real names of other people, no data about anybody who has not agreed to it, and a parent who knows the account exists. Under those conditions, yes: a twelve year old with eighteen months of visible history at fourteen is in an unusual position, and the habit is far easier to build early than to retrofit.
What if the project is not very good?
Then it is a project that is not very good, published honestly, which is still worth more than nothing published. The checklist deliberately contains no requirement to be impressive. It requires the work to run, to be readable, to state its own error and to admit its failures. A modest thing that does all five reads better to an experienced person than an ambitious thing that does none.
Do you build the project for them?
No, and this is worth being blunt about because some providers do. A teacher reviews, questions, refuses to accept a number without a baseline, and points at the paragraph the student has not written. The student writes the code. A portfolio the learner cannot explain in an interview is worse than no portfolio, because it fails at exactly the moment it is supposed to help.
How much does it cost?
A group batch of five to eight students is USD 100 a month and one to one teaching is USD 150 a month, billed in US dollars, the same flat figures everywhere outside India. There is no enrolment fee, no annual contract, and the first class is free without a card.
Could this go into the national Olympiad?
It is the right shape for it, and we cannot promise anything about selection. For scale: the 2025/26 National Olympiad for Scientific Innovations, Robotics and AI took 70 projects across four fields, of which Information Technology is one, from more than 250 students. A working, measured, documented project is a strong entry into a field that size. Entry routes go through your school rather than through us.
What kind of projects do students actually pick?
Whatever they can check the answer to, which is the only rule we impose. That tends to mean something local and small: a prediction about something they measured themselves, a tool for a problem in their own house, a model of something they watch happen. Grand topics with no ground truth are how projects die, because the student can never tell whether they are wrong.
Does this need special software or a paid account?
No. Git and GitHub are free, Python is free, and the libraries are free. Deployment for a student project is normally free too. The one exception is the coding agents strand, where the student needs their own subscription to the tools that course works with, and that is stated on the course page rather than buried.
My child already has projects. Can you just review them?
Yes, and that is a common one to one request. We go through what exists against the five criteria, which usually means adding the error figure, the baseline and the failure note rather than writing new code. That is often a few sessions rather than a term, and it frequently doubles what the existing work is worth.
What happens after we send the form?
A mentor calls you at an Omani hour to arrange the free session. Nothing is charged and no card is asked for. The form starts a conversation, not an enrolment, and holds no seat. Where the learner starts, the format and the evening are agreed on that call ahead of any discussion of money.
