11-Year-Old Smarty Pants Develops iPhone App
Posted by SunnyChanel at 10:00 AM on July 2, 2009
When I’m tooling around town, I like to daydream about get rich quick schemes. Besides winning the lottery, playing the market or getting a big old book deal, one of my most current and prevalent fantasies is of designing a best selling iPhone App. But you know what stops me – besides a great idea- not knowing how to do the programming. Did that get in the way of 11-year-old Owen Voohees? No way Jose.
Over the last 9 months, Owen has buried himself in university-level computer science books, a foreign programming language and “a mountain of doubt” to build his very own iPhone application. His creation MathTime debuted last month on Mac’s App Store and soon rose to number thirteen in the paid educational apps section.
What is MathTime? It is like a flashcard drill which includes addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. But Owen didn’t do it all alone. Nope, he enlisted an ‘art guy’, his 9 –year-old brother Finn who did the math graphics in PhotoShop.
Owen said about creating the tool, “I thought it would be cool…It’s really cool to make something work, to make a little money, to do something like this and see it up” on the App Store.” In one day the .99 cent app was downloaded 141 times. “It started booming,” said Owen, “I woke up and I was like, I’m an entrepreneur now.”
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