A new website built by students was recently launched that is meant to help Valencia High School students navigate resources for advanced placement courses.  Ritu Yeshala, a Valencia High senior, said she has been hearing from other students how hard it can be to talk to the right people about what an AP course is really like and the best strategies to prepare for the AP exams.  “I know it is pretty hard to just reach out to a person, just if you don’t know them super well, to ask for help,” Yeshala said in a phone interview.  With that in mind, Yeshala and a friend of hers, fellow Valencia senior Samantha Armitage, set out over the summer break to create a website that contains all of the known resources for students to easily find. Yeshala said she took a computer science course at College of the Canyons that provided a foundation of skills needed to build the site.  Taking four AP classes this year to make it 13 throughout all of high school, Yeshala said she drew on her own experiences and talked with other students who performed well on the AP exams to gather the resources needed.  “We went to the students because the teachers are teaching, but I think that the students have a better view of like what works well, what doesn’t work well, because they’re the ones taking the actual AP exam,” Yeshala said, adding that she got approval from the administration before venturing off on her project.  There are currently 18 courses with resources on the site. Yeshala said the hope is that courses are added to the site as they are offered. She added that it is not widely used as of now — she estimated that about 20 people currently use it — but could become more impactful as exam season comes around in the spring.  Planning to major in computer science in college, Yeshala said she is looking mainly at University of California schools as well as some out-of-state schools.  While there, she said her big project would be to build a mobile app that allows people in rural areas around the world to find resources or experts in a field to help solve problems.   “My dad actually had this idea,” Yeshala said. “He grew up in this village in India, and they didn’t have a lot of resources and a lot of help and access to things from the outside world … My dad was thinking about creating an app where people who are successful in all these different fields, like computer science and agriculture and many, many different areas, the people from those these villages can easily seek out help and advice.”  And once she does leave high school, Yeshala hopes that the site does not simply go away.  “With the amount of hours I put in, I want to make sure that it’s something that doesn’t just like die down the second I leave,” Yeshala said. “So, I definitely will be teaching (someone). I’m going to look for someone who has knowledge on this specific programming language, and if they don’t, I will give them a lot of help and just make it so that they’re not completely like, ‘What do I do?’”  Have a potential resource for an AP class? Visit tinyurl.com/mtywzt44 to submit it.  The post Valencia students create study hub for AP courses  appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.