At Kodecoon Academy, we believe that students should be able to apply their knowledge learned from classes to their own everyday lives and strive for excellence. Here, we talk about some outstanding people from our youngest generation, who truly do embody this belief.
Firstly, we have Seth Yee, an 11-year-old Singaporean boy deemed by the media to be a computer prodigy. You might remember him from Channel News Asia, On The Red Dot series, or perhaps you have read about him from the news.
By the age of 8, he had already picked up 3 coding languages, Arduino (C/C++), JavaScript and Python and made his own computer programmes. His family soon moved to Australia and there, he spends his time teaching others about code through Minecraft. (Psst… inspire your child to be like Seth Yee with our Minecraft Holiday Camps held every holiday break where you too, can learn more about code through playing with Minecraft.)
Seth Yee’s dedication to learning more about coding through self-directed efforts and then becoming a talented programmer is truly a commendable feat that everyone should learn from.
Secondly, we have Dominic Darby who was only 6 years old when he was first exposed to coding through a summer program that introduced him to Scratch, a programming platform developed by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) .
Since then, it has ignited his passion for code and he has self-taught coding through YouTube videos and books. He created his very first game at 11 and entered his first coding competition, XPRIZE Connect Code Game, open to everyone all over the world between the ages 10 to 18. Dominic Darby’s strong passion for learning about coding helped him emerge as one of the 17 winners out of 3,000 participants. Catch a sneak peak of his game through this link! He continues to work hard at coding in hopes that he would be able to utilise this skill in his future occupation of a computer science engineer.
Third, we have Avi Schiffmann. Avi Schiffmann has always been interested in coding, programming websites and apps.
He mentions that he was self-taught and relied on YouTube and web development chat rooms to further his knowledge. When the coronavirus became more serious, he dedicated his time to creating a coronavirus tracker, completed with COVID statistics from every country impacted. Now, the website is one of the best COVID-19 tracker websites online and he was awarded Webby Person of the Year for his contributions. His coding knowledge and passion regarding the COVID situation helped to bring about an extremely useful tool that brought relief to many people as they were able to track accurate updates among the chaos. It is without a doubt that his dedication to learn helped to make this a reality.
Finally, we have Liu Haohui, a student of Raffles Junior College. Upon finding out that there were no programmes that could tackle the issue of fake news, she started researching the idea of data analytics and how it can be used to detect fake news.
She went for online classes with Udemy and picked up on a course. From there, she and her mentor worked hard to make a machine learning model that could detect fake news. Liu Haohui’s project was recognised and was awarded at Singapore Science and Engineering Fair. Using her own knowledge and then expanding on what she lacks by going to learn amore, Liu Haohui uses her skills to help mitigate issues that she spots in her community. She makes use of what she has been taught and further applies it to contribute back to society.
We hope after reading this, you (or your child) are inspired to learn more and most importantly, do more with the knowledge that they have acquired. These promising youngsters taught us the idea of self-directed learning and taking charge to create meaningful projects to solve community issues. This is only achievable through their hunger for knowledge and motivation to learn more.
Success is the uncommon application of common knowledge
Ivan Misner
What have you challenged your child to do today?