Bengaluru to Phoenix, with a stack of pirated PDFs in between.
I grew up in Bengaluru and moved to the US in middle school. I was curious about biology the way other kids are curious about football — obsessively, unprofitably, with no one in the family to ask. The textbooks I wanted cost more than my parents would say out loud. I downloaded what I could find.
The deeper I went, the more obvious it became that the resources weren't bad because they were free — they were bad because they were written for someone else. A college student with a syllabus. A grad student with a lab. Never the kid in seventh grade who just wanted to know how CRISPR actually worked.
So I wrote it for him. My brother is in seventh grade. He's the reason every module reads the way it does — assume nothing, explain everything, never condescend. If it works for him it works for the kid in a town I'll never visit who finds primerSTEM.org through a search result and reads it on their phone.
That's the whole project. The science is the easy part. The pedagogy — writing it so a curious twelve-year-old could finish a module and feel smarter, not stupider — that's what took two years.