10-year-old coder passes up Google offer to keep her business running
Image: CoderBunnyz official website
Coding sensation Samaira Mehta, a 10-year-old from Silicon Valley, passed up on joining Google so she could stay focused on running her company.
Mehta was scouted by Google chief culture officer Stacy Sullivan when she did a series of workshops held at the Google headquarters in Mountain View, California, reports Business Insider.
“After my back-to-back workshops at Google headquarters, we talked for an hour,” said Mehta. “She told me I was doing great and once I get out of college, I can come work for Google.”
Instead of accepting the offer, self-made Mehta said she quite liked being an entrepreneur, and wasn’t sure if she wanted to go work for Google.
Even at such a young age, Mehta is already the CEO of her own company called CoderBunnyz. The company, with help from her father, Intel engineer Rakesh Mehta, was built around a board game of the same name, which aims to help teach kids how to code. Mehta has been coding since she was 6 years old.
After Mehta was awarded second prize at Pitchfest 2016 by Think Tank Learning for her board game, she started to earn international fame and recognition. She was also scouted by Cartoon Network as one of their featured real life “Powerpuff Girls.”
Mehta then started conducting coding workshops using her board game. This year alone, 106 schools used CoderBunnyz as teaching material for coding classes for kids. The drive to spread the use of her board game came from her initiative called Yes, 1 Billion Kids Can Code. The initiative allowed donors to donate boxes of the game to schools.
The future for CoderBunnyz came in the form of a new board game called CoderMindz, which Mehta billed as the first artificial intelligence board game. While Bunnyz teaches kids how to code, Mindz plans to teach kids how to program AI. The new board game was developed with help from her 6-year-old brother Aadit. Alfred Bayle /ra
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