10-year-old coder is so successful, she’s become a Valley sensation

Samaira Mehta at
Google
Samaira
Mehta

• 10-year-old Samaira Mehta has become a kid-coder-to-watch in
  Silicon Valley.
• When she was just eight and she built a game called
  CoderBunnyz to help teach other kids how to code.
• The game earned her national recognition and she began
  holding workshops for kids, many of them at Google.
• Google was so impressed, it booked her as a keynote speaker
  for a local event, and told her she should consider working at
  Google when she grows up. 

 

Samaira Mehta is a 10-year-old girl growing up in Silicon Valley
who has quietly attracted an almost cult-like because of her work
as a programmer.

She’s the founder and CEO of a company called CoderBunnyz that’s
earned national
media recognition
and landed her speaker roles at nearly a dozen Valley conferences
(and counting). 

It all started when she was just eight and created a game called
CoderBunnyz to help teach other kids how to code. She’d been
coding since she was six.

A real life Powerpuff Girl

After creating the board game, Mehta won the $2,500 second place
prize from Think Tank
Learning’s Pitchfest in 2016. This caught the notice of
some marketeers for Cartoon Network who were looking to profile
inspiring young girls as
real life “Powerpuff Girls.” After she was featured in one of those
videos, things took off from there. 

Samaira Mehta at
Google
Samaira
Mehta

Mehta was featured on some newscasts and started selling her game
on Amazon.

“We’ve sold 1,000 boxes, so over $35,000 and it’s only been on
the market for one year,” the exuberant and adorable Mehta told
Business Insider.

It wasn’t just happenstance promotion. When she launched
CoderBunnyz she, with the help of her proud father Rakesh Mehta
(an Intel engineer and Sun Microsystems/Oracle alum), also came
up with a killer marketing plan. 

Mehta uses the game to conduct coding workshops for school-aged
kids, where everyone plays the game. And she thinks big. She
launched an initiative called Yes, 1
Billion Kids Can Code which allows interested people to
donate boxes of the game to schools. She then set up workshops to
help kids at those schools learn how to master the game.

At the start of this school year, 106 schools were using the game
to teach kids to code, Mehta says.

“In the world there are over 1 billion kids,” she said. “There
are people who are willing to donate Coder Bunnyz boxes to
schools, and to people in need all over the world, who want to
learn coding.”

Aadit
Mehta
CoderMindz

Sales of the game have gone so well, that Mehta has just
launched a sequel: a game for kids that teaches them how to code
using artificial intelligence.

The new game is called
CoderMindz and she’s billing it as the first ever AI board
game.

Like CoderBunnyz, kids will be learning basic AI principals,
concepts like training an AI model, inference, adaptive learning.
Eventually, they can use those skills to build robots.

She developed it with the help of her little
brother, Aadit. who is six, the age when her
dad started teaching her to code.

A young Valley star is born

As the game took off, Mehta was booked with workshops. She’s done
over 60 of them in Silicon Valley, (over 2000 kids) so far, she
says.

The workshops included a series held at Google headquarters in
Mountain View, California. And that’s where she met Stacy
Sullivan, Google’s Chief Culture Officer. 

Samaira
Mehta speaking at Microsoft Women in
Technology
CoderBunnyz

“After my back-to-back workshops at Google headquarters, we
talked for an hour. She told me I was doing great and once I get
out of college, I can come work for Google,” Mehta said.

The plucky young coder told Sullivan that she didn’t know if she
would want to work for Google. She likes being an
entrepreneur. 

Meanwhile, Sullivan and the folks at Google were so impressed
with the kid coder that she was the keynote speaker at a
Diversity in Tech conference held in August hosted at Google
Launchpad, the company’s startup accelerator in San Francisco.
But she’s done a bunch of speaking gigs including one at
Microsoft and at the Girls’ Festival
sponsored by World Wide Women earlier this month.

Samaira Mehta
Samaira
Mehta

Since the debut of CoderBunnyz she’s also met a lot of other
big names. One of her proudest moments was receiving an
encouraging letter from Michelle Obama in response to a letter
she had written back when Obama was still the First Lady.

She also met Mark Zuckerberg on Halloween when she was
trick-or-treating in his neighborhood, and took the opportunity
to chat him up about her coding work.

She said there was “a super long line” at his house but “I
finally got to meet him. He was handing out chocolates. I told
him I was a young coder and he told me to keep going, you’re
doing great,” she remembers.

She’s now launched her own
interview series on her CoderBunnyz website where she
talks with people in the robotics, game and education sectors.

CoderBunnyz
workshop
CoderBunnyz

While she’s reinvesting all of the money from her young business
into manufacturing more CoderBunnyz games, and creating the new
AI game, she’s already got a charity picked out for when she
generates profits: PATH.

“It ends homelessness and helps people rebuild skills and I care
about homeless,” she says.

Until the day her company can make donations, she’s putting her
entrepreneurial know-how to work in other ways to raise money for
it, including hosting a lemonade stand this summer that brought
in $119.