Making a difference

Young tech millionaire: D'Aloisio's app Summly automatically boils down lengthy news stories and features to make them more user friendly for a mobile screen.

Coding empowered these bright kids to create apps to make the world a better place.

Ez school bus locator

Arjun Kumar was 13 when he won the 2012 MIT App Inventor competition for his Android app called the Ez School Bus Locator.

The app not only shows parents if their children are in the school bus but also displays its location in real-time on a map along with the distance and time to reach the house.

Summly

At only 15, Nick D’Aloisio created the Trimit app in 2011 for Apple’s devices which summarises content for easy reading and posting on social media.

After securing funding from a billionaire, he made it better and called it Summly. This caught the attention of Yahoo! which forked out US$30mil (RM127.4mil) and integrated it into its own app.

Play Against Cancer

In 2007, Steven Gonzalez Jr had a rare form of cancer when he was only 12 and was given a 2% chance to live.

He survived and believed that playing videogames had something to do with it. He wanted to empower other cancer victims so he created a videogame called Play Against Cancer where players destroy cancer cells.

Learning complex maths

When she was only seven years old, Zora Ball created a mobile game app that teaches kids aged 12 to 16 to understand complex maths. She used Bootstrap, a programming language that is used for web development, to make the app.

Impossible Rush

Ben Pasternak, 15, got the idea for the Impossible Rush game while he was bored at school. The game, which tests the player’s reflexes, has been downloaded over 800,000 times as of January.