Gulliver Prep senior Ishan Shah is the Prep’s Silver Knight nominee in the vocational technical category.
Shah is an engineering student and one of the three co-founders of Career Ready Coding, a platform for teaching students the basics of coding.
He’s been working on CR Coding since the summer of freshman year. His favorite coding language is Java Script.
Through CR Coding, Shah and the other co-founders spent a lot of time teaching not only Gulliver students about coding, but students who attend Breakthrough Miami at Gulliver. They also go to CARE Elementary in Overtown and migrant center in Homestead to teach.
Now those classes are taught by students from the computer science classes. He still teaches occasionally.
“We do this coding thing where we teach all the freshman coding,” he says. “Last year I taught every week at least twice. This year, I’ve gone a couple of times, but not as much as I used to.”
The Gulliver students take Directed Studies, which is a free period. The freshmen are required to use 10 hours of the Directed Studies class to learn coding.
“I’ll teach those,” he says. “It’s fun. Some students really enjoy it and that makes it fun.”
The main mission is to ensure that everyone gets an equal opportunity to learn.
“For a person who doesn’t understand, we raise them to the level of the other students,” he says. “They get extra attention. We’ll have one person helping them out, play videos and things like that.”
What he likes about coding is creating something from scratch.
“The computer does what you tell it to do,” he says.
CR Coding won the Congressional App Challenge so the three co-founders traveled to Washington, D.C.
“It was fun. We got to meet not only our representatives, but other ones from different states,” he says.
Outside of working with computers, he plays the violin. He’s been playing since fourth grade and plays for the school.
Currently, he’s working on an engineering project called Oasis – short for Ocean Alert and Safety Information System. The system measures bacteria in the water by the beach. Currently, the EPA tests the water and it takes 24 hours for the information to go to the public.
“We are trying to get it down to six hours,” he says.
The system was developed to enter in the Conrad Spirit of Innovation Challenge.
“We built a prototype and we built an incubator for ourselves,” he says.
Shah is a member of the National Honor Society, Rho Kappa and Zeta Omicron.
Shah applied early decision to Northeastern and was accepted. He eventually wants to start his own business in security or cyber security or computer science in general.
Recently, he had a short stint at the company, Fiver where everything is $5 or you set your own price.
“I made websites for people,” he says.
He set his prices at $20 per website.
“I wasn’t trying to make money,” he says. “It was more for the experience.”
He made a couple of websites from scratch and some from WordPress.
He occasionally fosters animals with his family.
“We usually do it over the summer when there is no school,” he says.
Two years ago, they took in three kittens. This past summer they took in an old dog. The kittens were so young, their eyes were still shut. They required frequent bottle feedings.
“Every time they’d wake up, we’d feed them,” he says.
Shah admits it isn’t easy to give up the fostered animals.
“Even after a week or two, you get attached,” he says.
