Youth Incorporated Magazine

Anvitha Vijay, a nine-year-old Indian-origin girl has earned the distinction of being the youngest app developer at Apple’s annual developer conference with her apps for children. The little one now dreams of meeting the tech giant’s CEO Tim Cook.

Hailing from Australia, she is the youngest attendee at WWDC 2016 in San Francisco and has already built several apps for iPhone and iPad, according to a report in Fortune. Vijay spent a year watching free coding tutorials on YouTube and the web, and learned how to program. She explained that coding was really challenging but she stuck to it.

Vijay is attending WWDC as part of Apple’s scholarship program something she dreamt of, which gives hundreds of free tickets to developers from around the world who are creating apps for Apple devices. According to a report, out of 350 recipients of the scholarship, 120 are under the age of 18, and 22 percent are women, as part of an effort on Apple’s part to add diversity to its developer events.

The reason behind this is reported to be inspired by her toddler sister, who was learning how to talk and identify animals. Her brainchild was the Smartkins Animals app, which uses sounds, and flashcards to help teach children 100 different animals’ names and sounds. The young achiever then developed another similar interactive iOS app for children to help them learn colors and is now already working on her next app, which wants to help kids her own age with setting goals.

With WWDC, like most tech conferences, overwhelmingly dominated by white and Asian males, the company has also been making efforts to diversify the attendance at the annual event. Under that programme this year, Lilly is sending two female African American college students and three African American men to WWDC.