10-year-old Samaira Mehta has attracted the attention of the biggest tech giants for her coding skills. Mehta literally lives in Silicon Valley and her rise has been so sudden and fast. She is the founder and CEO of CoderBunnyz, a company that helps kids with coding. The company has earned her nationwide attention. As a result, Samaira has been invited to provide keynote speeches in many local tech events most of which are hosted by Google. So far, the 10-year-old has spoken in almost half a dozen events in Silicon Valley and judging by the progress thus far, no doubt there will be more.
Samaira’s journey started when she was just 8 years old when she created CoderBunnyz, a board game that helps kids learn how to code. She had actually been coding for two years before launching her board game. She started when she was 6 years old. The board game was presented during an event by the Think Tank Learning’s Pitchfest two years ago where Mehta won the second place prize worth $2,500. This was the biggest breakthrough for her. The invention caught the eye of some advertisers from Cartoon Network who were profiling inspiring girls to be part of the popular kids show Powerpuff Girls.
The show wanted to bring in real life inspirational girls and there was no doubt at the time that Samaira was indeed perfect for it, and she appeared in one of the “Powerpuff Girls” videos. After that, everything just took off for her. She was featured in a number of newscasts and soon after her game started selling on Amazon. In just one year, she has sold 1,000 boxes for a total of $35,000. Samaira has also conducted training workshops for the board game. This has helped her gain huge popularity across the country.
At the start of the school year, there were already 106 schools using the board game to teach children how to code. Due to the success of the board game, Samaira is launching a new sequel to the game that will now teach kids how to code with artificial intelligence. The new game is called CodeMindz and it will be the very first AI-inspired board game. With CodeMindz, kids get the chance to learn basic AI principles and tools including training an AI model. The idea is that eventually they can use these skills to build robots. Samaira developed this new game with the help of her brother Aadit who’s six years old.
So far the 10-year-old has done over 60 workshops in Silicon Valley. She has worked with over 2.000 kids too. Some of the workshops were held at Google’s headquarters. Samaira has met a lot of people too since she launched the board game including top executives at big tech companies. But her proudest moment she says was when she received an encouraging letter from former US first lady Michelle Obama.
