On a Tuesday evening, while Mumbai was bathing in a pre-monsoon shower, we were enjoying the luxury of being on a cloud — albeit a virtual one. Staring at us, on our desktop screen, were engineer Abhilasha Naidu and 13-year-old Joe Swarya Pidakala, both from Bengaluru. The duo is on WhiteHat Jr, a recently-launched live online 1:1 coding platform for kids aged six to 14. During the hour-long class, Pidakala was seen creating a basic pong — a two-dimensional sports game that simulates table tennis — with Naidu, his teacher, helping him achieve the task. This writer, on the other hand, was the observer: Watching without participating, like a disinterested student, yet quite not.

Every now and then, Naidu nudged Pidakala to think out of the box, and write the best possible command codes — not as complex as html, C or C++ — to create dynamic sounds, or to make animation, so that his player looked more human. By the end of it, we had a fully-functional pong, which incidentally had the sensibility of a football game, because Pidakala aspires to be a footballer, and he'd "rather create something that is closer to his interest".