Tanmay Bakshi: A 13-Year-Old Success Story – Behn Hayhoe
On the 16th of November, 4 Digital Leaders (Karan, Behn, James and Joe) travelled to London to the Halcyon International School, where a 13-year-old Canadian boy, called Tanmay, gave a Keynote speech on his life and success while developing iPad and iPhone apps.
We travelled to London by means of train, at 9am, you can imagine the experience. However, this was improved by the lack of a member of staff, so this meant that once we got to London, we basically had freedom of movement. We arrived at Stratford Station just after 10am and decided that we would look a little ‘over keen’ if we arrived 2 hours early. So after being fuelled by KFC and Subway, we got onto the Tube, another delight. We got off at Marble Arch Station and then walked over to the event at Halcyon International School.
Tanmay also talked about how he believes that coding should be introduced to the curricula of young people. He said that, as we get older and go onto higher-education, we are offered the chance to learn to code, but the percentage of people who choose to take up the opportunity is very low, but this is because people are less willing to learn new things.
Tanmay said that the world needs more coders, more AI developers and more people who want to explore what code can really do. It was a very interesting prospect for someone like myself but a very realistic one at that. Tanmay said that he is trying to help the situation and aims to teach 100,000 how to code and he has already helped around 2800 people.
After his Keynote speech, Tanmay gave us a workshop involving Watson, a program developed by IBM. Watson is a cognitive learning computer program which is able to be taught. For this example, we gave Watson a list of 80,000 names, a mixture of both male and female, from the US Census. After around 35 minutes, the RHS’ Watson instance had finished learning the gender patterns of the names.
While at the School, we were shown how powerful Swift Playgrounds. Swift Playgrounds is an app developed in-house by Apple which teaches people how to code using the swift language, apples own coding language. Swift Playgrounds essentially turns the laborious task of coding into a game where you need to complete specific tasks.
Tanmay, while Watson was finding and learning patterns, gave a demonstration on how apple’s xCode can be used to build Interfaces and apps. Once we build up the UI (User Interface) we started to dive into the deep end of manually linking our app to our Watson instance, it was quite challenging, but Tanmay was able to not only guide us on what to do but also gave us an insight into what each class & variable did.
Unfortunately we ran out of time, so Tanmay finished off his app and the showed us what it would look like on an iPhone, 9 times out of 10 the app guessed the name right, but it had some learning still to do. Overall it was a great day out and was well worth the time and preparation put into going to watch the event.
~The Digital Leaders Team digitalleaders@royalhospitalschool.org
Post Comment
You must be logged in to post a comment.