Nine-year-old boy Creates an app to educate people on waste management

Sean Solano Paul is a third standard student at National Centre for Excellence, Malleshpalya.

Recently, he created an app to help educate people about the importance of waste management. “On my way to school, I would see workers on the road, sorting waste with their bare hands, and it made me feel very sad,” says Sean, explaining the motivation behind creating the app. Realising that if people were to segregate waste at their homes, it would reduce the burden on others, he created the Trash Sorter app.

His teacher, Jatinder Kaur, helped him create the app. “It took us two hours to make it. We first focused on the designing aspect and then, coding.”

The app, that was created on WhiteHat Jr platform, is an interactive game of sorts. It allows users to segregate waste into dustbins labelled ‘biodegradable’ and ‘non-biodegradable’. “For each waste that you segregate correctly, you get a point,” he explains.

“By playing the game, people will understand what they need to do with their waste,” says Sean. At the moment, he is working on version 2.0 of the app, in which, instead of points, the users would get ‘cool facts’ for right answers, and ‘negative facts’ for wrong ones.

“Cool facts would be something positive, such as how banana peels are good fertilizers. A negative fact would be about maybe, how many trees are cut down on each year,” he says. In his free time, he plays Minecraft and learns coding and programming.