A 14-year old iPod Touch enthusiast is currently ruling the roost after designing his first game for the Apple App Store. Robert Nay launched his debut app, "Bubble Ball," on Dec. 29 and the simple game has managed to knock "Angry Birds," the app that had been holding the top spot for months, off of its perch.
"Bubble Ball" is described in the Apple Store as a "fun new physics game" and took Nay about a month to design and ready for launch. He figured out how to build it after reading some books at the library on the various programs he would need to construct an app. He reportedly plans on designing more applications in the future, although most likely they won't be free downloads like "Bubble Ball."
Nay joins a growing list of very young people accomplishing unexpected feats. Two weeks ago, it wasannounced that 10-year old Canadian citizen Kathryn Gray had become the youngest person ever to discover a supernova. Her find was verified by two other amateur astronomers in the U.S. before the news was shared with the rest of the world. The supernova that she discovered, located in a galaxy known as UGC-3378, is more than 240 million light years away from Earth.
And it was only a little more than a month ago that a group of 8- to 10-year-old British students became the youngest people ever published in Biology Letters, a highly respected science journal spearheaded by the Royal Society in the U.K. The students had conducted a study of the foraging behavior of bees, concluding that previously held assumptions regarding how bees picked their flowers were not flexible enough in their explanations.
Nay appears to be heading in an at least casually entrepreneurial direction with his Apple apps, and may be able to turn something that started out as a challenge from friends into a modest-sized business opportunity. His mother, Kari, may have had to help him with the some of the design for "Bubble Ball," but after having his first offering downloaded millions of times already, he probably has the next one all on his own.
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