Arya Peruma

AP🇨🇦

Photo: Coding for Young Minds / Newswire

The discovery that changed Arya Peruma's direction came not from a textbook but from a curriculum document. She was 14 years old, living in Ontario, Canada, and she had been coding since she was seven — working through tutorials, building small projects, developing the kind of fluency that comes from years of patient practice with a language that rewards patience. When she looked into what Ontario's public schools taught on the subject, she found almost nothing. Simple computer programming was not introduced until high school. Children younger than 14 — children exactly the age she had been when she started — had no structured pathway to what had become, for her, one of the most important skills she possessed. She decided to build one.

In 2019, Peruma founded Coding for Young Minds Community Organization, a not-for-profit based in Ontario that offers free live coding webinars, STEM blog articles, and workshop events to students from elementary through high school. She created the curriculum, designed the teaching approach, and became the lead instructor. The organization's mission was specific: to reach children as young as seven with live, interactive coding instruction — the kind that answers questions in real time and responds to confusion rather than presenting pre-recorded content and moving on. Peruma taught every session herself.

The scale of what she built became apparent in the numbers: 5,000 students across Canada and internationally had taken up her offer of free tutoring by the time she was 15. The sessions covered Python, JavaScript, Java, web development fundamentals, and the conceptual architecture of programming — how computers think, how algorithms work, why structure matters. Peruma was not simply teaching syntax. She was teaching the habit of mind that makes someone a programmer rather than someone who has memorized a few commands.

The recognition arrived quickly, because the work was visible and the impact was measurable. McMaster University's engineering faculty, one of the most prestigious engineering programs in Canada, awarded Peruma a scholarship for her work in coding and engineering while she was still 13 — an acknowledgment from a major institution that what she was doing deserved support. The Ontario government recognized her contributions with the Ontario Medal for Young Volunteers, presented at a virtual ceremony in April 2022 — an award given for exceptional dedication to making STEM and coding education inclusive and accessible.

She also partnered with established institutions: the City of Toronto, the United Way Waterloo Region, and other organizations to distribute robotics kits to children in economically challenged families — extending her reach beyond online webinars into hands-on hardware, into communities where the digital divide was most acute. This partnership work reflected an understanding of access that went beyond internet connectivity: it recognized that even free online education requires equipment, time, and a home environment that supports learning, and that reaching the most underserved students meant addressing those material barriers directly.

The International Women's Day profile of Peruma, published when she was 15, captured something her resume does not: her awareness of representation within the technology sector. She was deliberate about being visible as a young woman of color teaching technology, because the students most likely to benefit from seeing someone like her leading a coding session were the students most likely to have been told, implicitly or explicitly, that technology was not for people like them. The curriculum she built was not politically neutral in this sense — it was designed as an argument, made through practice, that coding belongs to everyone who wants to learn it.

Arya Peruma is now at the University of Waterloo studying computer engineering — one of Canada's most competitive and prestigious engineering programs. She carries into university the organization she built, the 5,000 students she taught, and the lesson she learned at 14: that if the institution you need does not exist, you can build it, and the building itself is the education.