Student Spotlight: The Teen Girl Who Is Fixing Modern Dating
The dating coach for teens, by teens.
What happens when kids have time to pursue their passions at school?
Dreams chased, businesses built, limiting beliefs broken — things many adults never get around to doing. This is the AlphaX Project: our four year, Olympic-level project for Alpha’s high-schoolers. (If you haven’t already, I strongly encourage you to read about it here.)
In the meantime, take a look at what one of our high schoolers is building.
This isn’t the 1950s dating scene anymore. Dating culture is no longer share-a-milkshake-at-the-soda-shop-and-have-her-home-by-nine type of vibe. Most teen interactions happen over Snapchat. Through a screen. In DMs. And there’s a dark side to this. Not only can it be wildly unsafe (with little to no parental supervision), it can negatively impact how teens interact in person.
Online, they feel smooth and confident with their crush. All they need are nimble thumbs and a keyboard. But passing them in the hallway is another story. IRL, it’s awkward, weird, uncomfortable. Teens are currently floundering in a digital dating scene that lacks genuine connection (isn’t that the whole point of dating!?) at the most vulnerable stage of their social lives.
And Elle, a junior at Alpha High, has had enough.
I recently sat down with Elle to hear about her AlphaX Project, and here’s the first thing she told me:
“People think teen dating is such a frivolous issue,” Elle says. “But no one realizes how terrible it’s gotten. When you look at the statistics, teens are dating less than they ever have. 45% of men ages 18-25 have never even asked a girl out. What happens in our teen years really does affect us as adults.”
Just a teen herself, Elle is doing what million-dollar tech companies and traditional educators have failed to do: help teenagers build safe, healthy, in-person connections in a world dominated by screens. She’s building an AI-powered dating coach for teens in order to answer one of the next generation’s most puzzling questions:
How can we get teenagers to connect IRL?
For all you skeptics out there, keep reading. I understand it’s easy to write off “an AI dating coach built by a high schooler.” (“I mean, is that even necessary? Do kids even need that?”) But Elle assures us it is — and her first 50,000 users agree.
Here’s the story.
Flashback to Elle’s freshman year of high school. She’s headed into “DreamLaunch”: the first leg of her AlphaX Project. (Again, if you haven’t read about AlphaX, I highly recommend it!)
There’s one thing all Alpha high schoolers go through: the 168 Hours Workshop. For an entire week (168 hours), each student diligently tracks their time. The goal is simple: figure out where their time goes. What are their habits? What are their biggest time sucks? Are they actually spending time on what they say they’re passionate about — running, painting, playing guitar — or are they binging Netflix? For Elle, the 168 Hours Workshop felt a bit like a wash.
“I spent most of my time scrolling TikTok and thinking about boys,” she says. “Arguably a frivolous passion. But my Guide, Chloe, didn’t even flinch when I told her that. She simply said, ‘Okay. Let’s work with it. There’s a pattern in here somewhere. And there was.”
Turns out, Elle loved psychology. Specifically, the psychology of dating. She realized: “I want to create a safe space for teens to date and connect.” But the world doesn’t need another dating app. In fact, Elle wanted to get people off of dating apps. So, for the next few months, she immersed herself in research. She tested dating ideas on TikTok, where she amassed over 65 million likes.
Suddenly, her DMs were flooded with thousands of dating questions from teenagers all over the country.
“I tried to respond to all of them because I wanted to help, but obviously, I can’t sit around and reply to DMs all day. So, I fine-tuned a quick LLM called Chat Base. It’s like a chatbot you can ask questions. Within three days, I exceeded the message credit limit for an entire year. That’s when I realized I was onto something.”
Enter: “AskElle.” The safe, smart, AI-powered dating coach for teens. It's a "second brain" trained on huge quantities of scientific research. You can download the app, ask the bot any dating-related question, and it will respond back with advice — but not “bot” advice prone to hallucinations. It gives advice that’s been vetted by a panel of teen psychologists, Stanford professors, relationship experts, and everyday moms. By no means is this your average AI chatbot.
For example, when a teenage boy asks the app, "How do I ask this girl to homecoming?", AskElle doesn’t just regurgitate a robotic list of steps like a standard LLM. (“Step One: Talk to her. Step Two: Ask her out.” Thanks, Einstein.) Instead, it digs down to the root cause, helping kids understand and reframe their anxiety. Why are you afraid to ask this girl out? Why does society place so much pressure on these moments? How can you mitigate feelings of rejection? How can you pursue connection with confidence? Only after building emotional understanding does it suggest practical strategies. In short, AskElle is less about pick up lines and “rizz” and more about building emotional fluency in a digital world that’s trying to suppress it.
"It’s almost like dating therapy,” Elle says. “It doesn’t just serve you pickup lines — although, it can if you want it to — it helps you understand why you feel the way you do."
The coolest part about AskElle, in my opinion? The app is not designed to maximize screen time. Its north star is behavior change.
"The app doesn’t make money by time spent — it makes money by actual behavior change."
Elle wants teens to spend less time on apps, not more. She’s not looking for advertisers to throw money in her direction. Instead, she’s trying to reach parents who want to invest in tools that truly help their kids develop offline social skills. This distinction is huge. In an era where tech giants profit from teen addiction, where screentime feeds off of young attention like a parasite, Elle is charting a different path. One rooted in real-world connection.
"There’s just such a generational divide," Elle explains. "When a dad says, 'Son, go ask her out,' he doesn’t realize it’s happening over Snapchat now."
Parents who grew up passing notes in class or calling their crush's landline often struggle to understand the complexity of modern teen communication. AskElle bridges this gap. Of course, there are safety benchmarks in place. AskElle is trained to identify outlying cases or suspicious inquiries. For instance, say a teen girl mentions that her boyfriend is abusing her. AskElle immediately responds with: “Go talk to your parents.” The app is designed to help teens navigate socially awkward situations and supplement in-person connection, not take the place of a parent.
Ultimately, Elle wants to use technology as a bridge towards human connection in a world where screens often separate us. Perhaps, most impressively, is that she has accomplished all of this before her senior prom.
For me, this is a warning bell. Elle is in the thick of her high school years. She knows the culture of modern teen dating better than all of us. And what she’s seeing isn’t good. She’s taken an arguably “frivolous” issue — teen dating — and is pouring her heart and soul into creating a salve, a solution, a way for teens to grow and connect in healthy ways. And you know what? It sounds exactly like what the next generation needs.
Learn more about Alpha High right here.