Kathleen Chaykowski

Alex Foyt is already a veteran of creating online games at the age of 12, boasting 98 titles in six years, including a survival challenge that involves dodging carrots and chickens falling from the sky. The secret to Foyt’s game-making prowess: He learned coding with a programming language called Lua, which relies on easy-to- understand syntax, before he went on to master more advanced software-development tools. “I really want to be a computer programmer and build my own codes for a living,” said Foyt, a resident of Albany, New York, who recently trekked to Santa Clara, California, for a...

Mobile software startup 52apps has an ambitious goal: create a new application for the iPhone or iPad every week. Just as ambitious: Do it with college students in South Carolina, far from the engineering hotbeds of Silicon Valley, New York or Austin, Texas. The company, based at the University of South Carolina in Columbia, can create an app in five days with “premade programming Lego blocks,” said Chief Executive Officer Steve Leicht, one of three non-students at the company who work for free. That means a chunk of code can quickly add GPS features or the ability to share...