An app-titude for programming

While most other eight-year-old kids in Shepparton were out raising hell, programming prodigy Gavin Douch was thinking about computational logic.Twelve years later, just out of high school, Mr Douch has released his second app.StudyStreaks, which launched a week ago, is a study planner app designed to help people concentrate, prioritise work and become better students.Mr Douch said although it had not been as successful as his previous app, he was pleased with the 50 or so downloads, and the number of people coming back to use the app, in the past week.“With school about to start, there could be a bit of a boom,” he said.Mr Douch said the idea behind the app evolved out of a spreadsheet he used in years 10 to 12, where he logged all of his study times to help motivate himself.“I thought it wouldn’t be easy to teach people how to use the spreadsheet, so I decided to make an app,” he said.The app uses a ‘25-minutes of study, five minutes’ break’ method inspired by the Pomodoro technique, an idea based on cognitive science research showing people cannot concentrate for longer than 25 minutes without a short break.Mr Douch’s interest in programming piqued when he was eight or nine years old, when a Playstation game called