A Brisbane teen saw a six-computer lab in Sri Lanka and wrote a programming language

Neth Dharmasiri was handed a beginner’s Python guide by his dad at 11. Six years on, ABC News reported, he is still coding, and he told the broadcaster, “I’m not gifted, I’m not particularly intelligent.” The more useful detail is what he did with the habit.

On a 2025 trip to Sri Lanka, his parents’ homeland, Dharmasiri saw a computer lab in a tiny rural village that had six computers. Back in Queensland, he and his friend Chinmay Lal, both 17, started building a learning tool for places like that. The result is Thadus, a coding course designed to work offline where connections are patchy.

What it is

Thadus is a simplified text programming language that borrows from Java, Python and C and is meant to bridge the jump from block tools such as Scratch to real code, according to a HundrED profile. HundrED notes that the page is innovator-submitted and not evaluated by the organization, so those details are the founders’ own.

ABC reported three courses that connect coding to real-world industries, with the third covering data science. Per the HundrED profile, the program runs about three months, arrives as a monthly subscription with printable PDFs, and is recommended for grades 5 to 9. Dharmasiri also spent about a year building the language itself.

Who pays, who doesn’t

Thadus CodeLabs is a for-profit venture, ABC reported, but it is free for not-for-profits and charities. HundrED lists subsidized fees for rural schools.

The team partnered with Kushil Gunasekera, a Sri Lankan philanthropist whose Foundation of Goodness charity runs 22 computer labs across rural Sri Lanka. “I can’t adequately emphasise the need and how important it is to structure and train these kids,” Gunasekera told ABC. HundrED also lists Educate 4.0 in South Africa as a partner.

Reach

HundrED says the product has more than 600 paying students since January 2026, across several countries. That is a self-reported figure and we found no independent count. ABC, in January, said only that the app had been released to market.

The ABC piece does not name the students’ school or the app’s technology, and we could not find a second news report, so this is a thinner file than we would like. The shape is clear, though: a student sees a lab with six computers, and the first thing he builds is software that does not need a good connection.