Basil Okpara, a nine-year-old boy who lives with
his parents in Lagos, has reportedly built over 30 mobile games.
According to CNN, Basil builds the games using
Scratch 2, a free programming application, which allows users to create games,
animations, and stories.
It takes him about 30 minutes to create a new
mobile game. The boy, who expressed his liking for building animal games, race
games, and running games, is aspiring to become a scientist.
“In the future,
I want to be a scientist. I have built over 30 mobile games. I like to build
animal games, car race games, and running games,” Basil told CNN.
This 9-year-old has built more than 30 mobile games https://t.co/5zgexWDluL pic.twitter.com/jqOnje9oya— CNN (@CNN) August 7, 2019
Basil’s interest in creating his games two years
ago when he got scolded for spending all of his time playing games. His father,
Basil Okpara, snr, said his son had always shown interest in computers and was
always playing games with his phone.
“He used to pick my phone to play games like
candy crush, subway surfers, temple run, always playing games,” CNN quoted him
to have said.
“There was this day he was on the tablet, as
usual, he was so carried away with the game he was playing that I got upset
with him. Then I told him instead of playing all these games, why don’t you
build your own games so other kids can play?. I said it out of annoyance but he
took it seriously.”
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| Basil’s parent |
“So when I noticed he had a very serious interest in computers, I got him a laptop.”
In March, his father signed him up for a five-day
boot camp organised by Codefest International for children aged 5-15. The
training exposes children to emerging technologies like robotics and virtual
reality.
“I learned how to build games at a boot camp.
Now, I build to keep me busy when I am bored,” he said.
Basil’s games are still in their raw form and can
currently only be accessed on computers that have Scratch 2 installed but one
of the games, frog attack, will be available to the public on Google play store
in August.
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| Basil: Thinking of coming up with another idea? |
Fathia Abdullahi, a 12-year-old Nigerian girl,
had also gained recognition after she created a robot that folds clothes in
“three seconds” — barely a year after she started coding.
The young programmer was said to have started
coding at the age of 11.
Fathia had said she designed the robot prototype
to fold T-shirts because “there are too many clothes to fold” during the
weekends.
Surely he would give tough competition to augmented reality app development company in coming future.
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