After recognizing a lack of free study materials for AP courses in his freshman year, Archbishop Mitty High School junior Aaryan Parikh, along with his two co-founders from AMHS and BASIS Independent Silicon Valley High School, began laying the groundwork for Stellar Learning. This free online nonprofit platform aims to help students study for various subjects through practice problems and mock exams. His mission: to provide free, high-quality education for those studying for AP exams or academic competitions.
Sophomore Derek Li joined Stellar Learning in 2025 as the Director of Development for Competitive Mathematics. By developing tools like “Proof practice”, a practice tool for writing mathematical proofs, and “Quasar”, a database of questions from various math competitions, he found joy in using his passion for math and programming skills to help strangers study more effectively online. According to Li, the organization is student-run, with more than 130 high school student volunteers from 24 different states. Among these volunteers is junior Stefan Hsueh, who currently oversees the development of their physics curriculum. He believes that Stellar Learning is perfect for students who need to review for big tests covering many different topics, such as AP tests.
“It’s essentially a catalog of almost every single subject that you would need to study for,” Hsueh said. “I think its biggest use case is practice, because I think it is really good at giving you practice problems to do. After all, there are practically an infinite number of questions.”
Despite the Stellar Learning team’s initial confidence, as they expanded, they ran into a variety of roadblocks. For instance, Li says they had users try to exploit one of their AI learning tools, which cost the nonprofit a portion of their funds. Additionally, Parikh believes that despite the team’s talent, it became tricky to manage the growing number of volunteers. Hsueh agrees with this sentiment, adding that they began having issues recruiting volunteers who were dedicated to the organization’s mission.
“One of the new hires used ChatGPT to write half of the AP Physics C: Electricity and Magnetism curriculum,” Hsueh said. “When I looked at it, it was clearly not up to our standards. One of the biggest things we’ve had to do is to be careful with who we hire, because sometimes they’re just there to get that title and say, ‘I contributed.’”
Despite these roadblocks, Stellar Learning has also had its fair share of successes. In particular, Parikh was impressed by the team’s rollout of AP Cybersecurity and AP Business curricula that College Board has set to launch in the 2026-27 school year.
“As a team, we got more motivated,” said Parikh. “The better the product was, the more user feedback we got, and we realized that any feedback is good feedback. From the feedback, we would realize that there would be something that we should hone in more on, and that’s how we kept building stuff that our users wanted.”
According to Li, the platform received the most users in the months before the American Math Competition in November and AP tests in May. During these months, Stellar Learning has had more than 20,000 users per day. The team is now looking to reach their next milestone at 50,000 users while diversifying their user base to reach a wider demographic.
“It’s hard to see direct impact since it is an online platform,” Li said. “But seeing 1,000 students during some months on the competitive math section alone is really cool. I like how I’m able to have that kind of impact on that many different students.”
Freshman Ananth Arun used Stellar Learning to help him study for the AMC after initially learning about the platform from Li. He says he enjoys studying with the “Quasar” tool, which continually presents him with problems to solve. Along with that tool, the platform has sections for past exams for a wide array of different math competitions.
“I remember Derek was walking around telling people to use Stellar Learning, so I tried it, and it was pretty cool,” Arun said. “Although it didn’t feel fully developed, it was still pretty good. I’m probably going to use it in the future when studying for AP tests.”
Even with their growing user base, both Li and Parikh agree that the student-run organization still has much more room to grow. They believe their next steps are to start collaborating with larger education technology companies, such as the YC-backed startup Open Note, an AI notetaking platform.
“I definitely see users continuing to use Stellar Learning, and it’s not going to be just something that we started in high school, and it’s not going to end after high school,” said Parikh. “Stellar Learning will be around in the coming years, and I think we’ll still have a sizable user base. I actually see more potential in Stellar after we’re out of high school, since we would have more resources to utilize.”
Li says he understands the nonprofit’s mission of providing free and accessible study resources. He adds that he was originally motivated to make competitive math resources more accessible to disadvantaged and marginalized students, a mission that he intends to further pursue.
“I know how expensive math camps and classes can be, and I know a ton of people are not going to be able to afford that kind of education,” Li said. “Stellar Learning isn’t really a replacement for those kinds of camps and classes, but it’s great at letting aspiring students learn and practice what would otherwise be expensive material.”
