Though he may look like any other average pre-teen, Mohammad Raza isn’t your average school-age kid. Because while other children his age spend their days daydreaming about cricket, cartoons and the occasional childish treat, 11 years old Raza spends his days in more fruitful pursuits. Whizz kid Raza spends his days programming.
But to say that Raza is just another intelligent kid who knows how to code would be a gross understatement because Raza is helping build some of the most remarkable softwares in the market -namely, softwares that help to catch most wanted criminals as well as creating language predictors that no one else has, as of yet, been able to develop.
Raza owes his passion for programming to his father’s friend who downloaded the programming language, GW Basic (and later on, the programming language, C), on to the child’s computer. Later, YouTube tutorials and other resources available online helped the young mister’s passion to flourish into what it has grown into today.
But that is not to say that the road up until here has been easy for Raza. When he was a mere 9 years of age, he moved to Lahore from Karachi with his parents to set up a printing business which saw a steady decline, thus, making it difficult for his parents to provide him with a steady, normal educational experience.
This happened around the same time when Raza’s father saw a report on television about a robotics event held at Lahore’s Information Technology University. Sensing his own child’s potential before anyone had even guessed, Raza’s father contacted Talha Rehmani, a faculty member at the aforementioned university who, though skeptical at first, quickly became another fan of the child, his passion and his talents. Thus, Rehmani took the child under his wing and taught him the concepts that he had been unable to grasp by his own self-study and enabled the little prodigy to start making waves in his chosen field. Even though he is studying at difficulty levels far above his age, Raza is still the star pupil in his class.
According to him, Raza doesn’t just want to make softwares or conduct researches for the sake of the things but wants to do it so that he can help take Pakistan forward and with this level of passion, it won’t be a surprise if we find ourselves writing about Raza again in the not so distant future only to report that he has, in fact, done every bit of what he had initially intended to do.
image: ITUPunjab + Plan9incubator / Twitter
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