Wonder kid at WWDC
Anvitha Vijay, a nine-year-old Indian-origin wonder girl from Australia, has become the youngest app developer at WWDC 2016, Apple’s annual developer conference, with her apps for children, according to a report by Fortune. At WWDC she will get an opportunity to rub shoulders with the top award-winning Apple developers from around the world.
Tim Cook singled out Anvitha at WWDC
Anvitha was singled out by Apple CEO Tim Cook as one of the best, brightest, and youngest app developers in the world. Tim Cook used his keynote speech at WWDC in San Francisco to highlight Apple sponsored 350 students invited to Apple’s event, while showering praise on the youngest participant Anvita.
Out of 350 recipients of Apple scholarship, 22% are women
Every year Apple gives away free tickets to hundreds of students to attend the WWDC. Out of 350 lucky recipients this year, 120 are students under the age of 18. The number of women who applied for the scholarship tripled this year and 22% of scholarship winners are women, which is an increase from last year.
Anvitha taught herself coding, watching YouTube videos
She taught herself how to code when she was just seven, using YouTube and online videos. Anvitha wanted to make an app that would help her toddler sister to identify animals. Two years later ‘Smartkins Animals,' an educational app aimed at small kids made it into Apple's App Store.
The iOS app helped her to win one of the 350 Apple scholarships for young coders to attend WWDC. Her interactive Smartkins Animals app helps kids identify over 100 animal names and sounds. Her next app, Smartkins Rainbow Colors, is designed to help young kids learn about colors.
She won Student Edge $10,000 Media kit Prize at the OzApp awards in Australia
This Mount View Primary School student from Melbourne designed and prototyped the app GoalsHi, over the summer holidays, for which she won Student Edge $10,000 Media kit Prize at the OzApp awards in Australia in 2015. Anvitha’s mother Buvana Vijay, a business adviser with IBM is the inspiration for her daughter.
Her father is a capital projects manager for APA Group.
Works and thinks like a seasoned professional
Anvitha is already focused on her next app, which will set the goal of empowering young girls and help them develop confidence in the classroom. She used Apple's Swift coding language to develop the second app, and now keen to get her hands on Swift Playground, Apple's new app announced at WWDC, which teaches children to code. Describing her coding experience, the nine-year-old said like a professional developer, that it required a lot of hard work to turn the idea into an app and processes like prototyping, designing, wireframing, coding, and testing.
Steve Jobs is her role model
Apple co-founder and former chief executive Steve Jobs is Anvitha’s role model. Like Steve Jobs, she also wants to be one of the top entrepreneurs in the world. She is also like any other normal kid on the block, who likes to play with her friends and roller-skate.
