Nine-Year-Old Vihaan Khera From Delhi Built An App For Kids To Easily Exchange Books

Vihaan Khera is just nine years old, but that by no means makes him a kid with no vision.

On the contrary, he's been using the training he's receiving in programming to build an app important to other kids like him, so they can all have a slightly better time of things.

Khera attends the Kunskapsskolan school in Gurgaon, but he's been learning coding through the White Hat Jr program. It's an online platform that teaches kids how to code, from the comfort of their own homes. And Khera has used it to build his own app for school kids, called Book Barter.

Book Barter has kids (or most likely their parents) register on the app, with a list of the school textbooks they own or need. If a user choose to loan a book, that textbook is featured on the app with the details put into it, as well as an image, so someone else that needs it can get in touch privately. If you're instead borrowing, you can search for the book of your choice, click on the one you want, and then contact the donor in-app.

The idea is that kids have far too many textbooks for school, and barely any of them are worth the paper they're printed on beyond a single year. So allowing kids to easily trade books around within an app doesn't just make it way cheaper for parents to buy their kids' textbooks, it's also helpful for the environment by making sure paper isn't unnecessarily used reprinting the same books year after year.

The app isn't just for school texts though, but for books of all kinds. Khera says he's a fast reader, and he kept exhausting his supply of story books, so he figured the best way to trade them around would be an app. And so, Book Barter was born.