Samaira Mehta | |
|---|---|
| Born | March 2, 2008 |
| Occupation(s) | Coder, inventor, chief executive officer |
| Years active | 2016–present |
| Known for | CoderBunnyz |
Samaira Mehta is an American coder and board game designer. She is the founder and chief executive officer of CoderBunnyz, a company that produces a board game of the same name for teaching children how to code.
Mehta is from Santa Clara, California. [1] Her father is an engineer. [2] She began coding when she was 6 years old with her father as her teacher. She created the board game CoderBunnyz, with the help of her little brother, to teach other children how to code. [3] She designed the game over the course of a year. [4] After she came up with the game's design, she worked with graphics designers and game manufacturers in China and New Zealand. [2] Mehta speaks at workshops and conferences including at Microsoft, Intel, and Google. [3] She first started presenting at workshops at the Santa Clara City Library. [4] She spoke at the 2019 C2 Montréal Conference. [5] Mehta aims to eliminate gender bias and increase the number of women in engineering. [6]
The name "CoderBunnyz" combines her interest in board games and coding with bunnies, her favorite animal. [1] The game provides instruction on basic concepts in artificial intelligence and Java. [2] It includes five major topics including training, back propagation, inference, adaptive learning, and autonomous. [4]
In 2016, Mehta won the $2,500 second-place prize at Think Tank Learning's Pitchfest. She received a letter from former first lady Michelle Obama. [3]