9-year-old Nigerian boy Basil Okpara Jr builds more than 30 mobile games

The Nigerian boy who is a serial game developer has made use of what he learnt in a five-day boot camp organised for children aged five to 15.

Basil’s interest in creating games became more pronounced when he was seven years old. As at that time, he was always being scolded for spending all of his time playing games on phone until his father enrolled him at a camp organized by Codefest International.

The camp was put in place to give children like Basil access to emerging technologies like robotics and virtual reality.

The 9-year-old has built games with the help of a free programming application called Scratch 2 which allows users to create games, animations, and stories online or offline. It takes Basil just 30 minutes to create a mobile game.

So far, Basil has used it to generate more than 30 mobile games. Speaking on his new found love, he told CNN:

“I learned how to build games at a boot camp. Now, I build to keep me busy when I am bored.”

His father, Basil Okpara Sr, spoke of his son’s love for mobile games.

He said:

“Growing up, Basil used to play a lot of mobile games says his father. I bought him a tablet when he was four years old because I saw that he was always grabbing phones to play games with. He played Candy Crush and Temple Run a lot.”

Speaking further he explained that: “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. 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.”

Basil took up his father’s challenge and paid more attention and interest to learning how to make his own games. This prompted his parents to buy him a laptop and register him to learn the first steps to building games. He titles his games based on what they are about. R