9-Year-Old Girl Built App To Inspire Children, Explaining How ISRO Builds Space Rockets

Siya Narale may be just nine years old, but she's already shown a major interest in coding.

Not just utility apps though, Narale is more interested in helping kids learn about technology in the world around them, and even tech helping us out up in space.

As a student at the Tip Top Convent in Nagpur, she's developed an app that lets kids take a closer look at the kind of rockets ISRO launches. And not just peek at it, it also simulates how one is built and assembled at a space hangar, launched, and then lands on the Moon.

Narale has managed to do this thanks to the coding experience she's picked up learning through White Hat Jr. This is an online platform that teaches kids how to code, so they're prepared to take on a modern world where the skill has become that much more coveted.

Her app allows students to play around with the various parts of the rocket. It lets them see individual pieces separately, and attempt to assemble them in the correct order, like a game. That way, kids can more easily pick up an understanding of how basic space technology works. Not to mention it could help spark in them the urge to join the astrophysics field and eventually ISRO.

ISRO

Narale herself says she was inspired by the televised launch of the recent Chandrayaan-2 rocket to create this app. Though the mission never ended up putting a lander safely on the Moon's surface, it still was an impressive feat in general. In particular, she says she was inspired by the women scientists and engineers that were a part of the mission team.

This is exactly the kind of interest we need to build in young children in the country. You can force kids to take up science and engineering in college all you want. But it's not unless they can really develop a passion for it that they will achieve great things. And this is how you start.