Kids deserve more credit than they get. They're observant, incredibly intuitive and can sometimes figure out what the world needs faster than adults can.
With rapid advancements in technology, and coding education geared toward youth, it comes as no surprise that there are kids pushing innovation out there, and creating apps and programs at astonishingly young ages.
Here are 10 youth innovators, from ages seven to 15, particularly worth noting and working on projects ranging from games to anti-bullying apps.
1. Nick D'Aloisio
At only 15, Nick D'Aloisio created Trimit, a nifty iOS app that summarizes web content into short excerpts for various platforms like Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr. It also comes in handy if you want to read abstracts of longform articles.
According to Fast Company, the app's algorithm took D'Aloisio only a month of research to develop — the kind of research often conducted in multimillion-dollar programs and PhD theses.
2. Thomas Suarez
"A lot of kids these days like to play games, but now they want to make them," said Thomas Suarez at his TEDTalk in 2011, when he was only 12 years old. Suarez did just that by establishing his own company, CarrotCorp and creating several iOS apps. One app, called Earth Fortune, simply displayed different colors of the planet based on your fortune. His most successful, however, has been Bustin Jieber, a Justin Bieber-themed Whac-a-Mole game.
Suarez won a Tribeca Disruptive Innovation Award in 2012.
3. Aaron Sonson, Satwant Singh and Gregory Paczkowski
Through the Apps for Good course — a UK-based program for kids to learn how to make mobile, web and Facebook apps — teenagers Aaron Sonson, Satwant Singh and Gregory Paczkowski created Stop & Search. The app allows young people to rate their experiences with police after being stopped and search, to find necessary information about their rights and to allow people to map the search (revealing patterns).
Each of the three teens from inner London had experienced being stopped and searched several times, and they say on their website that they created Stop & Search with "hopes to bring transparency and fairness to the stop and search procedure."
4. Steven Gonzalez Jr.
When 12-year-old Steven Gonzalez Jr. was diagnosed Acute Myelogenous Leukemia, a rare form of cancer, doctors said that he had a 2% chance to live. But he beat the odds and survived, though his weak immune system forced him into isolation for 100 days. He credits video games for helping him through the rough experience.
Gonzalez wanted to help other cancer patients his age, and so he created a video game, Play Against Cancer, in which players destroy cancer cells illustrated as green ghosts. He also developed The Survivor Games, a social network and online community for teen cancer patients.
5. Team 2-the-Res-Q
The Stop & Search app isn't the only innovative idea that came out of the Apps for Good program. Team 2-the-Res-Q, made up of four 14-year-old girls, developed CyberMentors — an anti-bullying Android app for young people that focuses on building self-esteem and increasing safety. The app includes a messaging feature through which users can talk to a CyberMentor directly about experiences with bullying.
The 2-the-Res-Q team worked with Fuerte International, a mobile production agency based in London, to further develop the app. It's available on Google Play, and also on a web-based social platform.
6. Daniel Chao
Last year, when Daniel Chao was in fifth grade and 10 years old, he invented an app that keeps track of reading homework. Since he and his classmates had to turn in reading calendars every month in school, his app, iRead Monthly, lets a student click a particular date and enter the number of minutes he or she reads that day. At the end of the month, students can email it to their teachers.
Chao told CBS Denver that he's proud of the app and glad that Apple accepted his app despite his young age.
7. Zora Ball
At only seven years old, Zora Ball is the youngest person to develop a mobile game app. She participated in the University of Pennsylvania's FATE Bootstrap Expo in December 2012 (usually for ages 12 to 16), working with the Bootstrap programming language. According to the Philadelphia Tribune, the first-grade programmer was able to reconfigure her app immediately after being asked, proving that she did all of the work herself.
8. Lim Ding Wen
In 2009, when Singaporean programmer Lim Ding Wen was nine years old, he wrote a virtual painting app for his younger sisters to enjoy. The app, called Doodle Kids, was approved by Apple and uses several simple gestures to mimic how kids learn to draw.
Lim is fluent in six programming languages and has completed dozens of projects. As of August 2012, he's working on two new projects, including his first 3D game.
9. Zach Marks
When Zach Marks was 11 years old, he went behind his parents' backs to sign up for Facebook, which has a minimum age restriction of 13 years old. After his parents got upset, he decided to create a safe, kid-friendly social network on his own, called Grom Social.
As of December 2012, according to USA Today, Marks' site saw about 2,000 unique visitors a day and approximately 6,000 page views. That's pretty impressive, considering that so far, Grom Social has attracted users based mostly on word of mouth and only a small amount of marketing.
Grom Social has different verticals — including "Gaming," "Entertainment," and "Health & Fitness" — and has strong stances against bullying, drugs and smoking. Marks, now 12 years old, has gotten his whole family involved in Grom Social's development, and it seems to have a lot of promise.
10. Santiago Gonzalez
Fourteen-year-old Santiago Gonzalez has created 15 interesting iOS apps, ranging from games to educational tools. Super Slide Puzzle, for example, lets you rearrange shuffled pieces of a photograph of your choice, and you can play with others while utilizing its built-in voice chat. Space - Solar System allows users to tap on beautiful images of any planet and learn more about them.
And if creating awesome apps weren't enough, Gonzalez will be 16 years old when he graduates college, and 17 when he gets his master's degree in computer science. Oh, and he dreams in code.
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