Liam Rosenfeld could tell something was up.
As the 16-year-old walked into the Mall at Millenia’s Apple Store on Tuesday, he saw a swarm of employees and customers buzzing around a kiosk.
When he approached, the crowd parted, and there stood Apple CEO Tim Cook.
“I was not expecting that at all,” said Liam, still flush and grinning ear-to-ear after meeting Cook. “It was such an amazing surprise.”
Cook, 58, in town to speak at a conference, sat down for a short chat with Liam, who recently won a scholarship to attend Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference in San Jose, Calif., which starts June 3.
WWDC is one of the more highly anticipated conferences in the tech industry, with thousands of industry professionals making the trip to San Jose each year for a series of product announcements, workshops and all things Apple over the course of five days.
This year, 350 scholarships were made available to students worldwide, including Liam.
The Lyman High School sophomore has grown a coding club he started in November to 16 people, equally split between boys and girls.
His mobile app, which converts images into art made up of symbols and numbers known as ASCII, has a 4.2 rating on the App store. He also has two other apps in development, including one that teaches musicians how to tune their instruments through game play.
Liam says it’s clear to him what he should focus on in school.
“There aren’t many things you can get into in high school and use it to move toward a career path,” Liam said. “Computer science is what is driving change.”
In a back conference room at the Apple store, Cook sat with Liam as he explained the mobile apps he had created, gathering feedback directly from Cook, one of the foremost experts of mobile apps in the world.
“My eyes aren’t as good as yours,” Cook joked, as he peered at Liam’s apps.
Cook said the Central Florida teen impressed him.
“He has a quality that I think is on a short list of characteristics that drive success, and that is curiosity,” said Cook, after talking with Liam about the creation of the coding club.
Apple’s App Store, which debuted in July 2008, now supports more than 2 million applications, many of which are created by students and others who have used the platform to make a living.
In Florida, jobs created through the App Store has grown by 51 percent during the last 2 1/2 years, according to Apple officials.
Cook has long been an advocate for teaching coding in schools as a second language.
Offering scholarships to WWDC gives Apple a chance to help contribute to what has become a growing need for a tech workforce, Cook said.
“You need public, private, non-governmental organizations working together because this is not a trivial transformation that needs to happen here,” he said. “We have an obligation. We are fortunate to have had some success.”
Mary Acken gave up a long career in the defense industry to become a computer science teacher at Lyman.
She helped Liam establish the coding club. A UCF graduate, she says she has noticed that younger students come into her classroom with more coding skills, which means efforts by some schools to teach it earlier have been paying off.
“It’s amazing how native it is to some of these kids,” she said. “This year, in particular, I see how much more advanced and developed students are in 10th grade than even seniors.”
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