Want to get your kids to take up coding lessons over the summer break? Offer them the following story of 11-year-old Samaira Mehta, whose penchant for coding helped her become the CEO of her own company, bringing in upwards of $600,000.
Samaira was introduced to coding at the age of six by her father, and has since been enchanted by computer language. Her love for coding inspired her to create Coder Bunnyz, a brand of board games that teach kids how to code.
The 1-Billion Goal
Along with her five-year-old brother, Aadit, Samaira launched the “Yes, 1 Billion Kids Can Code” initiative.
“By the time we go to college, we want to ensure that all one billion kids in the world that do not have access to coding tools have already started their path towards coding and computational thinking,” the sibling duo say on the Coder Bunnyz website.
To make this happen, Samaira speaks at conferences around the globe about STEM education. She recently delivered a presentation to a crowd of about 10,000 people at the C2 Montreal Conference. She has also hosted 40 workshops with CoderBunnyz board games in Silicon Valley, where she lives.
Companies like Google and Facebook are taking notice of the young entrepreneur’s ambitions. She recently showed Facebook execs her board games that teach kids how to code and kick off their interest in STEM education. The company purchased 100 Coder Bunnyz games to donate to underprivileged schools.
Google invited Samaira to speak at its Take Your Child to Work Day event, and has also pledged to help reach her goal, by hosting 50 CoderBunnyz workshops at the Google Headquarters. A Google exec even gave Samaira a job offer when she is older.
How Does It Work?
The concept is simple: Players have to program their robot bunny with code cards to help it eat its carrot and reach its destination before other players do. While doing so, children from 4 years of age and up can learn coding concepts like loops, branches, parallelism, list, Stack, and algorithm writing. The levels grow along with age and skill levels, helping children eventually learn all the concepts used in Java, Python, Ruby and even C. They also learn real life skills like social interaction and problem solving.
Coder Bunnyz games retail on Amazon for $40. It has sold over 15,000 games, inching closer toward Samaira and Aadit’s goal of using board games that teach kids how to code.
What happens when the siblings have reached their goal?
“I want to become President of America when I’m a little older,” Samaira tells Yahoo Finance. “This position could give me a higher voice to do even greater things for our country, to accomplish so much more.”
Related – How a 9 Year Old Became the World’s Youngest Amazon Cloud Expert