JAXI THE ROBOT

Adam Dunn’s Jaxi the Robot game

Inspired by his 4-year-old daughter, Adam Dunn of Spanish Fork started developing Jaxi the Robot as a way to teach kids to code. Part of his personal philosophy is to “Give Back”, and Adam, active in the local community and a member of the Spanish Fork-Salem Chamber of Commerce sees helping youngsters is his way to give service.

Now the programming game has earned the Spanish Fork resident a spot in Salt Lake City’s Comic Con convention and $20,000 as the winner of the Utah Game Wars competition, organized by Zions Bank and Grow Utah.

Dunn, who is self-taught and says learning to program gave him direction as teenager, designed Jaxi with girls in mind, as he noticed over 80% of his co-workers and IT associates were male. At www.jaxitherobot.com, the pink robot is ejected into the robot junkyard at BlueBot International, and players must guide her through challenges and obstacles using Javascript.

“Jaxi’s story is a metaphor for the state of our world,” says Dunn on the game’s Kickstarter webpage. “Why is the ratio of boys to girls in engineering so disproportionate? Why are there so many boy robots to every girl one? This game answers that question and shows that there should be no difference between boys and girls in coding.”

Currently, Adam Dunn’s development of Jaxi the Robot is being promoted through a kickstarter campaign at Jaxi: the Robot by Adam Dunn — Kickstarter.

“This year’s selection process was very intense,” said T. Craig Bott, President and CEO of Grow Utah. “We normally select eight finalists, but there were so many outstanding entries this year that we could only agree on 10. That speaks to the level of maturity of Utah’s startup digital media and gaming companies. These are bright developers not only with outstanding coding skills but good business sense.”