“My name is Samaira Mehta, I’m 10 years old and I love to code.” She’s the inventor, founder and CEO of CoderBunnyz, a STEM-related teaching tool she conceived at age 7. It’s a “fun, farmyard adventure” board game for based on AI and Java to show youngsters how to code in a way that makes programming fun.
Holding her favorite stuffed animal, Samaira talks merrily about “very basic concepts like sequencing and conditionals to more advanced concepts like loops, functions, stack, queue, lists, parallelism, inheritance and many others.”
It’s a family affair. Her little brother tests prototypes like Samaira’s latest game, CoderMindz, for teaching AI comprehension, while her mother handles marketing and social media and her father, a Silicon Valley engineer at Intel, advises.
Samaira teaches workshops, sold 1,000 games at $34.95 in year one, has distributed to over 100 school districts, appeared as keynote speaker at the Diversity in Tech Conference hosted at Google Launchpad, won a Youth Entrepreneur Award and has created an initiative to get one billion kids to code. Watch Samaira on the TODAY Show.