At 13, most of us measure achievements in the number of hours clocked in front of the television or in the levels crossed in video games. However, for Sivan Sundaravadivelu, a class 7 student of Cathedral High School here, achievement is measured in the number of downloads for his android applications.
He has more than 1,000 downloads for his applications (or simply called ‘apps' in the online word) developed for the Android market.
When he developed the ‘Fusion Tables' application earlier this year, he joined the ranks of Lim Ding Wen from Singapore, who wrote an iPhone app at the age of nine, and 13-year-old Aaron Bond from U.K., to become one among the world's youngest mobile application developers.
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For Mr. Sivan, coding was simply an extension of playing computer games. “While he played computer games, he also started learning various computer languages,” says his father, Kandaswamy Sundaravadivelu. “Sometimes, it is hard to get things right. You try coding for hours, and then when you test it you see an error. This gets you angry and frustrated,” says Mr. Sivan.
However, he perfected his coding, and when he was only 11, secured an A+ grade at the National Graphics Championship in the category, Web Designing. Impressed by his son's coding skills, some time last year, his father suggested that Mr. Sivan develop an application for an Android phone he had bought recently. Though Mr. Kandaswamy had said this in jest, Mr. Sivan took it up as a challenge.
For a fee of $25, he enrolled as an Android application developer. Using the developer kit, he developed Fusion Tables — an application to share data tables online in various formats. The success of that spurred him to develop three more applications — ‘Geocode', ‘Where am I? Geocode' and ‘Trackby'.
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‘Where Am I? Geocode' — which gives the location of any address in latitude and longitude — is by far the most popular.
His ambitions revolve around coding and gaming, with the software whiz kid aiming to join an international game development company.