More Indian kids taking to coding 

When 12-year-old Tanmay Bakshi from Toronto, Canada, addresses over 10,000 coders at IBM 's biggest-ever developer meet in Bengaluru on Thursday, he will join a growing list of Indian-origin kids making their presence felt across the global developer stage.

Earlier this week, nine-year-old Anvitha Vijay — who has several iOS applications to her credit — was invited as the youngest-ever participant at tech giant Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco.

A few weeks earlier, 8-year-old Medansh Mehta wowed Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella , who was visiting India, with a game he had created. The Navi Mumbai kid who first started coding a year ago, began with basic languages like Logo and Scratch. "You can make anything you can imagine," Mehta told ETwhen asked about why he codes.

Over the past few years, there has been a sharp increase in the number of kids taking to coding while still in school.
The trend is fueled partly by parents who are comfortable with technology and end up exposing their children to it, as well as schools that have started teaching basic computer programming as early as the third grade.

For instance, Mehta's father, an avid coder, started teaching him some basics at home. 13-year-old Priyal Jain, on the other hand, learnt programming language Python at home when she was ten, and then enrolled in an android programming course at Acadgild, a Bengaluru-based technology education startup co-founded by her father Vikalp Jain and Silicon Valley serial entrepreneur Vinod Dham.

Recently, Jain teamed up with another Acadgild student, 12-year-old Prateek Mahesh to launch an android app, vPledge, at the end of an android training summer camp they attended. Mahesh learnt QBasic at school and then Python via YouTube tutorials before seeking out a programming course. A tabla player and blogger in his free time, Mahesh dreams of studying at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and starting his own tech company. Jain, on the other hand, wants to go to Stanford and eventually work at Google.
Interestingly, like Mahesh, many kids are entirely self-taught - they pick up programming through online tutorials.

Simran Singh discovered coding quite by accident when he was 13 and playing San Andreas, a popular video game. "I started coding servers that people could play the game on and taught myself programming through tutorials and articles online," said the 17-year-old Kanpur resident.

He recently created an app that allows users to measure algae levels in water, something that won him a prize at Imagine Cup, a global student technology competition Microsoft hosts.

For their part, most technology companies have a slew of competitions and programmes to get more children interested in STEM (science, technology, engineering and maths) globally. Last year IBM hosted Hackerupt in Bengaluru, what it said was India's first hackathon for high school kids. Directi runs CodeChef, an initiative aimed at getting more students interested in coding.

As for why giants like Apple , Microsoft and IBM are trotting out child coders at events, the answer is simple: marketing departments love child prodigies. "As long as it's not being done just for publicity and these companies actually have programmes in place that will help develop their skills further, it is fine," says a former marketing head at an IT services firm. "At the same time, you have to realise that children that age don't have the maturity to handle stardom," he adds.

Interestingly, when quizzed about their role models, most kids say that it is Mark Zuckerberg or Steve Jobs who inspire them. Sandy Carter, General Manager of Ecosystem Development and Social Business, IBM believes that there is a case for more home-grown role models. "I met this young girl, a 15-year old in Bengaluru, who was on her second startup, which allows young readers to borrow books on a subscription model and then let's you discuss the books in an online community. And one of the things she said really stuck with me. She said she didn't have role-models here. That is something we should change for these young entrepreneurs."

Source:Techgig