Shikha Learning Labs
Shantilal Shanghvi Foundation
Shikha Labs builds Sakhee, an EdTech platform used by teachers, students, principals and school admins across 117 schools. On the teaching side that means planning a lesson, building an assessment, seeing how a class is doing. Ten products sit in the platform, and four are mine end to end: I write the frontend and the backend, design the database, deploy it, and I am the one who gets paged when something breaks in production. I gather the requirements for those four myself and build from there, and they hold at 96%+ crash-free sessions. A change to one table is a change all four have to live with, so that database gets argued about before it gets written. Two peer-reviewed papers have been published on this work: one on the history chatbots (CELDA 2025), and one on how the platform was designed with teachers (Springer CCIS 2026). My colleagues wrote them, including our founder and my own product manager. My part is the engineering.
- I took the AI Teacher Coach from a web app to an installable PWA, then built the Android app in React Native and shipped it to the Play Store, all of it myself. Around 200 teachers now record about 400 classes a week on it. Before this, judging how a teacher taught meant a mentor sitting through the whole class — a sixty-minute class cost a mentor sixty minutes, and it only happened when a mentor was free. Feedback now comes back in five to ten minutes, with nobody in the room.
- Eight of the ten products used to feel like eight different apps — a button that looked one way here and another way there, and logging into a second product meant logging in all over again. I pulled the repeated pieces into one shared component library and built a single login that checks a user’s role to decide which of the eight they can open.
- I built the portfolio portal end to end, web and Android. 300+ students keep a public website of their best work on it, adding up to 5,000+ submissions a month, and an AI assessor takes the first pass on every one — approve, reject, or a comment — so a teacher checks the disagreements instead of reading everything. I measure that assessor against teacher judgement rather than assuming it is right: it agrees 7 times in 10 today, and no prompt, model or model-setting change ships until it clears that number. Repeat scoring is cached on a hash of the scores, the prompt version and the model, so a result is only recomputed when one of those three actually changes. A submission that fails retries on its own, and a job that runs twice saves the result once, not twice.
- Two pieces of Sakhee are mine. One is the school calendar — terms, holidays, timetables — which I later moved into its own service, so the rest of the platform asks it instead of every app keeping its own copy of the dates. The other is the Google Drive link: a teacher’s files sync both ways with every version kept, and while they are still typing it waits for a pause before saving. An hour of editing leaves one version, not forty. The build and deploy pipelines for our four services are mine too.
- A state authority is having a platform built to check school quality, and three of us built it. I built the front end: signing in, a different dashboard for each kind of user, forms that save as you fill them so a bad connection does not cost an hour of work, a calendar of what is due, and the school report pages. A colleague wrote the part that does the scoring.
- In the 50+ rural schools where the connection drops several times a day, class recordings were going missing. I built the offline-safe recording twice, once for each app. The PWA saves a recording in the browser first, the Android app saves it on the device, and both upload in order once the signal returns. A second problem was quieter and worse: on Android, unsaved audio was being deleted before it had gone anywhere, and nobody reported it, because nobody knew it had happened. Recordings were not failing to upload — they were gone before the upload was ever attempted. I traced it, and every file now has to prove it exists before anything writes over it.
- I build whole products here too. The institute’s new website is mine end to end, still in progress: 14 pages and an admin area where staff edit their own content, with a draft kept separate from what the public sees so a half-finished edit never goes out. There is a second one, a content platform for a state education department, where I am the only engineer.