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Kedar Narayan, a 10-year-old from Lower Nazareth township, Pennsylvania, really, really loves pollinators—the bees, butterflies, hummingbirds, beetles, flies and bats that pollinate more than 75 percent of all our flowers and food crops.
“They’re extremely important for humanity,” Kedar says. “Without pollinators we wouldn’t have a lot of the foods we like, like apple juice.”
Bees are his favorite pollinator, and he’s worried about them. There aren’t enough gardens with plants that help pollinators thrive. “Instead there are lawns,” he says, “which are like deserts for pollinators.”
Kedar’s solution: Pollinator for a Pet app to teach people how to replace lawns with pollinator gardens, complete with a database of more than 90 plants. He built the app by himself, with input from gardening experts at Penn State, using MIT’s App Inventor tool and his own knowledge. (He’s been coding since age 5.)
“There were a trillion parts where I got stuck,” he says. “First of all, I had to make that big list of plants. Then I have filters. Say you want to know all the plants in my database that are white. It was really challenging to make filters that would filter out all these plants in an algorithmic way.”
Of course, Kedar planted his own pollinator garden (although he has reserved some lawn for playing Batman). “We have bee balm and there was one bee who would always suck on it and hit the other bees away. We called him ‘The Bully.’ We have summersweet, which is like the God of plants for bees. We have butterfly weed, which is the only plant monarchs come to to plant their eggs.”
Related: The 7 Best Plants to Attract Bees
He loves puzzles and crafts, particularly origami. His website, heartforwildlife.com, offers kits for making butterfly brooch pins and info on pollinators. Kedar is a fan of Warren Buffett’s Secret Millionaire’s Club web series and would like to be a wealthy philanthropist one day. He’s saving money and donating 10 percent of the profits from the sale of his butterfly kits to the National Wildlife Federation. His app won first place for his age group in the international Paradigm Challenge competition last year.
“With the success of my pollinator app, I’m mainly just very happy,” he says. “I’m trying to help a big cause and support the entire environment and creatures in all of the world.”
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