Ayusha Nilayam: teaching Python and math to a children's home

How it started

In October 2025 a family friend introduced me to someone who helps run daily activities at Ayusha Nilayam, a children's home in the Alwal and Kompally area of Hyderabad. I told her what I could offer: I am not a trained teacher, but I can teach Python and math reasonably well, and I wanted to do that for children who might not otherwise meet either. They said to send a Zoom link. The first call was on November 9, 2025. It began twenty minutes late because of a weak Wi-Fi signal, with four children around one small screen and a fifth leaning in from outside the frame.

I did not have a lesson plan for day one. I asked who they were, their grades, whether they had used a computer for anything but video, and whether they liked math. Teaching started the next week. Over the eight months, the group grew from those first children to about eight regulars on Sundays, and eleven children took part in all.

The constraints

• One shared laptop. The home has a single laptop for calls like this, an older Windows machine. Installing Python took fifty minutes instead of the twenty I had planned: the first download stalled, and nobody had ticked "Add Python to PATH", so the terminal did not recognize python.
• An unreliable connection. Calls dropped words and sometimes dropped altogether. Lessons had to survive a lost minute.
• Two languages. Some of the younger children are more comfortable in Telugu than in English, and technical vocabulary arrived in English. A caretaker and older children translated in real time; I learned to slow down and use physical examples.
• Limited visibility. Over one small webcam I often could not see the code on the screen, so I asked children to read their work aloud and explain ideas in their own words.

What I taught

The two subjects ran side by side, and I tried to connect them.

• Python. A first print("Namaste, world!"), then variables, input(), strings, numbers, booleans and comparisons, if/else including nested conditions, while and for loops, lists, and functions. It ended with small independent projects: a calculator and a number-guessing game.
• Math. Balancing equations and inequalities, graphing intuition, trigonometry from right triangles to the unit circle (including measuring the height of a kite string), and statistics from mean and median to spread, using cricket scores as the data.

Starting with a riddle before code, a balance scale for equations and cricket scores for statistics were all attempts to begin from something the children already cared about. After a three-week break in December, everyone came back, and an ungraded review showed Python concepts held up better than algebra, which is why later sessions kept returning to earlier material.

Two weeks in person

I traveled to Hyderabad in late May 2026 and taught at the home until June 6. The building has one classroom-like room with a chalkboard, and the courtyard serves as a play area and, that fortnight, a classroom. Lessons changed shape: whiteboard-first, no screen, and constant adaptation. One day the power failed in the middle of a lesson on lists, so we moved into the courtyard and used pebbles in a row to stand in for list indexing. In a review, each child explained one concept aloud to the group in their own words. The last lesson was a number-guessing game that combined input, conditionals and the random module; each child extended it their own way, with hints, a loop or a cricket theme.

A week after leaving, I returned to Zoom with a clearer picture of the room behind each tile on the screen and two new regulars who had joined in person.

What I changed

• I plan for the setup to fail: printed backups, lessons that work without the screen, and a slower first session for any new tool.
• I check understanding by asking children to explain, not by asking whether they understand.
• I leave time for translation and I repeat the ideas that matter in more than one form.

There was no formal assessment here and no comparison group, so I make no claim about learning gains. What I can report is what was taught, how often, and what I saw. I do not publish the children's full names or photographs.

The full series

I wrote a post after nearly every class: thirty-eight in all, from “The First Zoom Call” (November 9, 2025) to “Eight Months, Thirty-Eight Classes” (July 19, 2026). They are in the India Outreach section of the writing page, with the children referred to by first name only.