From Campus to Classroom: Stories That Shape Education
The North Texas student is the first Kid of the Year honoree to also be named a TIME for Kids Service Star.
FRISCO, Texas — A North Texas high school student who created an app to protect seniors against cybercrime can now add being named TIME magazine’s Kid of the Year to her list of accomplishments.
Tejasvi Manoj, a student at Frisco ISD’s Lebanon Trail High School, started the process of building Shield Seniors after receiving a call in 2024 while heading home from a Scouting America camp that her 85-year-old grandfather had been targeted in an email scam seeking $2,000 to settle an unexpected debt for a family member, as TIME reported.
“Given the apparent emergency, Tejasvi’s grandfather was prepared to transfer the funds—but her father urged him not to and the grandfather, at the suggestion of his wife, then called the uncle to see if the request was legitimate,” TIME’s story reads.
The request turned out not to be legitimate, but the near-miss spurred Tejasvi to begin researching online scams. She learned that the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center received nearly 860,000 scam reports in 2024, with potential losses exceeding $16 billion, the magazine reported.
“Tejasvi was surprised that there was such a lack of awareness among her grandparents,” Aishwarya Manoj, her mother, told TIME. “It was like, Why did you not know? That’s when she went on with her research and found out that it was not an isolated case with her grandparents, but a much larger problem.”
Tejasvi, who’d reportedly begun coding in eighth grade, attended summer programs from Girls Who Code, been involved in Cyber-Patriot, a joint Air Force and Space Force program seeking to raise interest in cybersecurity and STEM among young people, and attended the Mark Cuban Foundation AI Bootcamp in the fall of 2024, began the process of building Shield Seniors. Shield Seniors is a website designed to help older adults recognize scams, analyze suspicious emails and texts, and report fraud to officials.
“I code mostly in Java and Python, and a bit of HTML,” Tejasvi told TIME. “I really love the fact that you can solve problems with your computer, and I really like creating.”
Shield Seniors offers information about online security and how to recognize online scams, a chatbot to answer questions about suspicious emails, messages, or websites, a means to upload screenshots of emails or messages to analyze and determine their legitimacy, as well as guides and frequently-asked questions to stay safe online.
Since the launch of Shield Seniors, Tejasvi received an honorable mention in the 2024 Congressional App Challenge, delivered a 2025 TEDx talk in Plano, and made appearances at assisted living facilities to talk about her website and how to stay safe online.
“Just make sure to check up on your loved ones,” Tejasvi told TIME. “Make sure that they’re staying safe online.”
Tejasvi is the first Kid of the Year honoree to also be a TIME for Kids Service Star.
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