TEN-year-old Melbourne schoolboy Yuma Soerianto has just done what most app makers dream about: he’s impressed the head of technology giant Apple with his skills.
Yuma, who is a Year 5 student at Middle Park Primary School in Melbourne, is the youngest attendee this week at the Worldwide Developers Conference*, Apple’s biggest event of the year that kicks off this week in San Jose, US.
Yuma decided at age six to start learning code because he said schoolwork was not a big enough challenge. He created his first app last year and now has five apps in the App Store.
At the conference, this young developer got to pitch* his ideas to the head of Apple, Tim Cook.
Yuma’s five apps include the Hunger Button, which he created to help families find a nearby restaurant for dinner, and Let’s Stack, which is a game involving stacking boxes that he made after seeing an arcade game at St Kilda’s Luna Park.
But the app that instantly impressed Cook was the one he quickly made on the flight over from Australia to help his parents work out the price for products by adding the local sales tax and doing the currency conversion* when they go shopping for souvenirs on the trip.
“Very cool, that’s great,” Cook told Yuma after seeing his app.
“You did this when you were on the plane from Australia to the US? Wow.”
“You can make an app in one hour. I’m impressed. I can’t wait to see what you do next.”
Yuma learnt the programming code Swift he uses to create the app by following online courses.
Yuma is also helping other kids, and adults, learn coding through his YouTube channel Anyone Can Code.
“I want to make apps that can revolutionise* the world. And I also want to teach the world coding and get people into coding,” he said.
“You can code if you have the patience to do it and you really want to do it.”
Yuma’s five apps are Let’s Stack, Hunger Button, Kid Calculator, Weather Duck and Pocket Poke.
While Yuma is the youngest developer at the conference, the oldest developer is 82-year-old Masako Wakamiya from Japan who created a gaming app aimed at older people, based on a Japanese doll festival called Hinamatsuri.
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