An 11-year-old child from New Orleans has made headlines for being exceptionally good at something that the majority of the population of adults on Earth don’t even understand— coding.
Fifth grader Harrison Brammel starts his day a little past the hour of seven every morning: he gets up, grabs a quick breakfast, and runs to his computer to do a little bit of coding before he takes off for school. At school, he tries to finish all his homework in the hallways in between his classes, so he will have more time working on his computer when he gets home.
Harrison has been teaching himself the art of coding over the past few months, with the help of YouTube videos and a book called “Sams Teach Yourself Java”, which his father bought for him from Barnes and Noble just this January.
The young tech guru’s passion for coding started from playing Minecraft, a highly addictive video game where users can create their own worlds using blocks. In this video game, gamers are able to create modifications, more commonly known as ‘mods’, where players usually learn a little bit of ‘coding’.
At his young age, Harrison was already able to build his very own role-playing game entirely from scratch, all on his own. His parents are working at non-tech fields, and the school he goes to only teaches basic computing, and he does not have a tutor nor any formal education on computer coding. Everything that he learned, he learned entirely on his own.
In an interview with CNN, Harrison told: “I like having control over my digital entertainment.”
These days, Harrison is busy creating a “Galactica-inspired” game, and on his spare time he teaches himself all things C, C#, C++, CSS, HTML, Objective-C, and Swift for iOS.
But he does try to get all the help he can by live-streaming videos of his coding, trying to get others to give him tips on placing the right codes.
“I want to be able to have a base of people who can help me find errors,” he told CNN.
But like any normal child, Harrison isn’t allowed to go on live cam with strangers from all sides of the world without his parents’ supervision. His mother, Jennifer Brammell, is usually folding laundry in the background while the young techie is busy live-streaming.
Although this young kid is most certainly one of a kind, he insists that everyone can do what he can do.
“It’s not too hard,” he told. “If you can look at something and type, you can code.”
Meanwhile, me at age 11 was nowhere near hacking. I probably was still playing with my food by then, haha, but hey, I grew up in the ’90 so I’ve got my excuse!
Wow! This is so great to see. I love it when children are encouraged to use their gifts to become more independent. I am in favor of children learning this way, rather than being stuck in a public school. Children should be treated as individuals and allowed to follow their own path.
He’s a cute kid, and is obviously intelligent and gifted on the technological side of things. I hope he’s well-rounded, and has friends and real world interactions, as well. No doubt, this boy will go on to do interesting and amazing things.
This kid is a genius and am sure he will go places.I am a computer programmer but sometimes am harassed by some codes,i wonder how this kid cope with the demands of coding.Keep it up boy.