NEW YORK: A nine-year-old Indian-origin girl has earned the distinction of being the youngest app developer at Apple’s annual developer conference.
Anvitha Vijay from Australia was the youngest attendee at Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) 2016 in San Francisco and has already built several apps for children that run on the iPhone and iPad, a report in Fortune said.
Vijay spent a year watching free coding tutorials on YouTube and the web, and learned how to program. “Coding was so challenging. But I’m so glad I stuck with it,” she said.
Vijay, who has been developing apps about empowering children, hopes to meet Apple CEO Tim Cook during the conference. She is attending WWDC as part of Apple’s scholarship programme, which gives hundreds of free tickets to developers from around the world who are creating apps for Apple devices.
Out of 350 recipients this year, 120 are students under the age of 18, Fortune said, adding that the number of women who applied for the scholarship tripled this year, and this year, 22% of scholarship winners are women, which is higher than last year.
The report said Vijay’s apps were inspired by her toddler sister, who was learning how to talk and identify animals.
{{/usCountry}}The report said Vijay’s apps were inspired by her toddler sister, who was learning how to talk and identify animals.
{{/usCountry}}Her brainchild was the Smartkins Animals app, which uses sounds, and flashcards to help teach children 100 different animals’ names and sounds.
She then developed another similar interactive iOS app for children to help them learn colours and is now already working on her next app, which wants to help kids her age with setting goals.