For young minds, the age of smartphones has presented itself with an unlimited supply of possibilities.

These ever-present gadgets not only facilitate communication and the worldwide spread of information, but also provide an outlet for creativity in the realm of entertainment.

Junior Alex Hawker is taking advantage of the countless capabilities of smartphones.

He has been programming since seventh grade and started designing applications as a result of his “desire to create games [he] would want to play.”
He recently released his first Android application, a game called Dungeon Sneak where the player explores a maze filled with enemies, traps, and treasure from a first person perspective.

To create the game, Alex used Java,  which is similar to C++, and the Program Eclipse, which provides a user interface for programming, runs emulators for debugging, and integrates several programming tools.

To create his artistic 3D backgrounds, Alex used a  program called Blender.
After hours upon hours of hard work, the finished product can be released onto the Android market.

Alex credits Mr. Dan Ary’s Computer Programming class as the foundation for his app-writing capabilities.

“Using the knowledge from his class, Google’s developer guide for Android app programming, and various programming forums, I learned how to make android applications,” Alex said.

The app isn’t available on Apple devices, and probably won’t be very soon: “in order to publish it on the iPhone, I would have to learn a totally different coding software, and that would be unbelievably difficult.”

While Alex has no scheduled apps to be released in the immediate future, he does plan to release an update for Dungeon Sneak, allowing the game to be played on older Android models, sometime very soon.