Story of 9-year-old Nigerian Boy Recognized on CNN to have built more than 30 Mobile Games

The 9-year-old is building a hide and seek game, using a free programming application called Scratch 2along-side all the other games he has built in the past.

The camp, organized by Codefest International, was put in place to give children like Basil access to emerging technologies like robotics and virtual reality.

Growing up, Basil used to play a lot of mobile games says his father, Basil Okpara Sr.

“I bought him a tablet when he was 4 years old because I saw that he was always grabbing phones to play games with. He played Candy Crush and Temple Run a lot,” the father told CNN.

But Basil’s interest in creating his games grew at age 7 after he got scolded for spending all of his time playing.

“There was this day he was on the tablet, as usual, he was so carried away with the game he was playing that I got upset with him,” his father said.

“Out of annoyance, I said to him, ‘you are always playing games, can’t you think about building your own games so others can play yours too?’. I was angry when I said it, and I did not know he took it seriously,” he added.

Since then, Basil actively showed interest in learning how to make his own games, prompting his parents to buy him a laptop and register him to learn the first steps of building games.

The games are still in their raw form and can currently only be accessed on computers that have Scratch 2 installed.