APP-TITUDE
South Africa's Silicon Valley whiz-kids
A NEW generation of technophiles, some still only in primary school, are making waves in the tech industry.
Like nine-year-old William Colglazier from Cape Town, who has received an international award for designing a cellphone application that highlights major tourist spots in a range of cities, including Athens, York in the UK and Cape Town.
Colglazier won the global entrepreneur award at the Data Days 2014 Conference in Ghent, Belgium, with his app @Me-onthe-Move, which provides information on events, transport timetables and restaurant ratings. And, if the whizz kid has his way, plenty more apps will be coming in the future.
Colglazier, who designed the app with his friend, eight-yearold Alexander Glidden, said they had collected the data on the cities covered by their app themselves. “Winning was awe- some,” he said. “I can now create more stuff using my mom’s phone and computer.”
Colglazier said his next move would be to build an application that would allow children his age to share material with each other. He said he would also teach children at school to create apps and try to get government support.
The boy is one of many young pupils around the world who are creating apps — for profit or just for fun.
Aidan Steyn, 11, also from Cape Town, was instrumental in building I’m Bored, a lifestyle and entertainment app. Available to Android phones, it lists a variety of events, activities and services that families can enjoy in and around Johannesburg, Cape Town and Durban .
The idea came after Steyn and his mother, Lorraine, visited more than 200 places where parents can take their children. They included zoos, parks, museums and places to eat.
Users can bookmark and set calendar reminders for upcoming events and use pins, linked to Google Maps, to highlight these choices. He said his app would enable bored children to show their parents where they could take them for fun.
“The kids can even choose where they want to go, like I did with my mom,” said Steyn.
Two pupils from Hoërskool Menlopark in Pretoria, Gerhard de Clercq and Pieter Sholtz, both aged 15, developed an app to feed data to 3D printers with Bluetooth. The app is able to slice a 3D model and also offers movement and rotation adjustment options.
De Clercq and Sholtz received a gold medal during last year’s Eskom Expo for Young Scientists. Their dream is to make 3D printing available throughout Africa.
Computer programmer Jacques Blom was 14 when he created his first Facebook app. Two years later, he is a cofounder of Cape Town-based nonprofit organisation Kids Who Code, which teaches children how to program.
Blom said everyone depended on technology for communication, entertainment and banking, but few people in South Africa know how to program. “I felt that I needed to change that,” he said.
Bradley Millar, whose futureTECH operation offers a range of technology services, said youngsters were well suited to app development because they are more in touch with the market.
“Given the increasing affordability of smartphones, tablets and laptops, youngsters with a questioning mind and willpower to undertake advanced problem-solving are finding the entry point to app development an easy process,” he said.