A prodigy in the making: Meet one of the world’s youngest game developers

Yuven Kumar from Greenwood High has been recognised as one of the world’s youngest game developers

Yuven Kumar is not your usual five-year-old. To begin with, according to the Briggs Myer personality test (a behavioural assessment test), he falls under the INFJ ( introverted, i ntuitive, feeling, and judging) type, with only 1% of the world population said to match it.

A class 1 student at Greenwood High International School, Yuven has been recognised as one of the world’s youngest, certified game developer by WhiteHat Jr, an ed-tech platform focused on teaching coding to children.

Yuven was not even qualified to sit for the demo class that was being offered by the company as the age category was 6-14 years and he is only a 5-year-old child.

However, the company decided to give him a chance and accommodated him for the demo and he took all by surprise.

Yuven learnt coding in his first six classes to be certified as probably one of the world's youngest game developer with a scholarship offer. The student’s assessment was based on factors like creativity, completion time, software engagement and debugging time.

Yuven designed a game where Dino, a dinosaur, who is famished after playing football, has to navigate his way through obstacles to reach his food.

His coded project has been selected as WhiteHat Jr’s project of the month and been awarded a distinction amongst 38,000 entries received by them from more than 1,30,000 students globally. Their algorithm selected the top projects on the basis of three attributes: concept implementation, code blueprint and project design.

Yuven said, "My dream is to visit NASA and see astronauts there." His mother, Sukanya Kumar said, that her son is already able to solve mathematical problems that are taught in Class 3.

“He is not very conscious about his achievements. What comes naturally to him is effortless learning. He was always enthusiastic and has been eager to learn since he was a little child. We explored avenues for him as he was easily doing things way ahead of his time and went on scoring ranks at international levels in preschool itself,” she said.