The Cambridge Dictionary defines a prodigy as “someone with a very great ability that usually shows itself when that person is a young child.” Whether Chatham resident Navtej Bhatti is one might be open to interpretation, but let’s do a brief roll call of what Bhatti has accomplished to this point as a 16-year-old preparing to start his senior year at Glenwood High School:
He taught himself to code complex computer programs in the fifth grade. By the 10th grade, he created an app that won a national contest sponsored by Congress. Now, Bhatti is spending his summer teaching kids a personally-created web-development class at the Frank and Linda Vala Dream Center, 1480 N. Fifth St., Springfield.
If you spend a little time talking to Bhatti, you’ll catch yourself wanting to check his birth certificate. The following is his verbatim answer to the question: “What’s the mission statement of your summer class?”
“I want the people here, if they continue to choose to live in Springfield and central Illinois, to form their own companies. I want them to innovate in their own ways so that they can enrich our surrounding community,” Bhatti said. “Across the world, you’re going to see really good theoretical education. Let’s say you’re in college, and you have a web-development class. That class is going to teach you really well. It’s going to teach you everything in a syllabus and you’re probably going to end up remembering it as well. But the question is, will you like it? Will you actually have a passion for it? Is it something that can become your medium, something where you can express your own personal interests? I feel like college classes, they can’t really do that. There has to be some intrinsic motivation beyond money. That’s what these free camps are for.”
Motivation beyond money is a frequent theme of Bhatti’s. He seems to know already that he might make a lot of money someday in the computer field. But just making money, he says, is a “boring concept.” What he seems to be searching for is a way to combine his raw math and computer skills with yearnings of true artistic expression. At one point, Bhatti sounds like the next wannabe Steve Jobs. The next, he sounds like the next Michelangelo.
“Let me give you this analogy: When you were a kid, I’m sure you remember art class. I remember, like, in third grade, our art teacher handed us these oil pastels. Before that, I didn’t consider myself good at art. I thought I was better at reading and writing,” Bhatti said. “But after a couple of weeks with those oil pastels, I figured out that I really liked drawing with them. I’m sure when we’re babies, we scribble on some paper and show it to our parents, and they’re going to act surprised. When you’re a child, you don’t have these restrictions on your creativity. But when you become an adolescent or an adult, you’re a little more reserved about these things. There are certain things that you’re good at and there are certain things that you aren’t. So, what I’m trying to do with these camps is I’m trying to convince the kids that these computers, programming languages and codes, are a way to express yourself.”
Eleven-year-old Iles School student Holden Cherrone was one of Bhatti’s students in the first week of his summer course. Bhatti patiently went through a slide show with plenty of text instructions, but it was when Cherrone started asking questions that Bhatti seemed to energize more fully. Bhatti would crouch down, explaining in as plain a language as he could, his eyes widening with each additional question.
Cherrone said his big takeaway from Day One of the course was, “I learned a lot more of what a website is, and how a browser is like a translator.”
Bhatti is aware of the perception that AI is going to make future coding jobs obsolete, if it hasn’t already. He is dismissive of AI, saying, “I don’t think it’s going to push the envelope,” and that nothing will ever compete with pure, original thought.
“They’re trying to mimic the operation of the human brain, and there’s no formula to do that. That’s something that requires something like not only intuition, but your own creativity,” Bhatti said. “I’ve distanced my program from monetization, a quality that aligns with other Dream Center programs that are free or low-cost. My program is for something like art and the human consciousness, not necessarily learning employable skills. Artificial intelligence is just a formula. It’s just thoughts that people have thought before. You basically just feed it a lot of humans’ reactions (from) before. Critical thinking skills – that’s what’s going to be employable.”
Bhatti, who is undecided on where to apply for college, moved with his family to Chatham from Gainesville, Florida, about seven years ago. He’s close with his parents and younger sister, but particularly with his grandfather, Sukhvinder, who started his own machinist company in Dehradun, India, and still employs many people there. It was his grandfather’s blend of ambition mixed with artistry and benevolence that really inspired him at a young age.
“I still talk with him at least twice a week,” Bhatti said. “I want to see how this works out for the students, because that’s what worked for me. I don’t’ really see that style of teaching in computer science. I feel like it’s in the common core, but I want to bring it to elective activities, in things like music or art.”
What is Bhatti’s dream for his future? “I really want to find like-minded people in whatever college I go to. Maybe we could collaborate to find a solution for something that society values. But it only takes one person who can take technological improvements and synthesize them into something society values,” Bhatti said.
The final installment of the class is being offered from 10 a.m.-noon Aug. 4-8 at the Dream Center. For more information, email navtejbhatti08@gmail.com.
This article appears in SBJ August 2025.