Samaira Mehta

Mehta is from Santa Clara, California.^[1] Her father is an engineer.^[2] She began coding when she was 6 years old with her father as her teacher. She created the board game CoderBunnyz, with the help of her little brother, to teach other children how to code.^[3] She designed the game over the course of a year.^[4] After she came up with the game's design, she worked with graphics designers and game manufacturers in China and New Zealand.^[2] Mehta speaks at workshops and conferences including at Microsoft, Intel, and Google.^[3] She first started presenting at workshops at the Santa Clara City Library.^[4] She spoke at the 2019 C2 Montréal Conference.^[5] Mehta aims to eliminate gender bias and increase the number of women in engineering.^[6]

The name "CoderBunnyz" combines her interest in board games and coding with bunnies, her favorite animal.^[1] The game provides instruction on basic concepts in artificial intelligence and Java.^[2] It includes five major topics including training, back propagation, inference, adaptive learning, and autonomous.^[4]

In 2016, Mehta won the $2,500 second-place prize at Think Tank Learning's Pitchfest. She received a letter from former first lady Michelle Obama.^[3]