Education.

From my experience, just trying to combine technology and teaching isn't good enough. We need something better than what we have now.

One: Why does it seem all the text is in caps?

Two: Why would we want a engine with Maya or 3DStudioMax interoperability? Most indie developers would not be able to afford Autodesk products because they are so pricey. The only people I know who use Autodesk in the gaming industry are those who make AAA games. If you want to contact the least common denominator, then you need to make some changes to the way you do things.

It's not meant for hobbyists/indie developers.

This may be what you are looking for: http://cylonjs.com/

It's a javascript framework for robotics.

I third Haxe. From what I've read and done in it, it is a extremely nice language to work within. I just wish it had a bit more tutorials for people to learn from.

Perhaps later in life.

I see that there is no HTTPS on the website. You may want to fix this if you want this to be safe to use on a day to day basis.

It's suggested that the most optimal profile are people under 35, but I don't think people over that age are automatically disqualified. It's just that the majority profile they are looking for contains males who are under 35.

Thank You For Making the Decision to Register for OneMatch Joining the OneMatch Stem Cell and Marrow Network is simple. If you’re between the ages of 17 and 35 and in good general health, you’re eligible to sign up. You can start the registration process here.

How would you go about finding a concept to build a app around? You don't want to end up building a so-called "sitcom" app which no one uses.

Don't worry about success of your idea if your primary focus is gaining experience. If you get some success as a side effect then that is a nice bonus, but the more important thing is that you gain experience and practice which makes you a success later on when you are working on getting a real job.

Personally when I was your age I was creating websites. I made a book search engine, and a geoip enhanced amazon affiliate ad system for easily adding affiliate ads to blogs and websites. Both achieved some minor success, although they eventually got banned by Amazon (the book search engine because I was scraping Amazon content, and the ad system because it got adopted by a lot of spammy content farmers because it was a highly effective way to monetize Google traffic, so Amazon blocked my API access).

So the ultimate success of my ideas was minimal, but the experience I gained from those two projects got me a great job at a startup that has led me down a very successful career path so far.

> You don't want to end up building a so-called "sitcom" app which no one uses.

Why not? The point is to learn. Good software engineering skills take years of practice and experience.

One good experience to have is finding out that something you enjoy building might not be something people enjoy using.

Make something you're interested in using yourself. It doesn't matter if the app already exists. Read reviews, see what people do and don't like about it and try to make a better version.

LOL.. at 16, it doesn't matter... you don't have much overhead.. do something you're passionate about.

When I was closer to that age, there wer 16yo running major pirate software networks, art groups, bulletin boards and even developing related software for the fun of it... if someone finds it useful, awesome, if it solves a problem you experience even better.

It doesn't have to be widely used for the experience to be beneficial, and to make a little money off of it.

From the site:

Google Summer of Code is a global program that offers post-secondary student developers ages 18 and older stipends to write code for various open source software projects.

How about... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Code-in ?

If these are still available, could I get one? ETA: Disregard this post.