What it’s like being a scarily talented teenager

It was when she said how she loved ‘watching the computer do exactly what you wanted it to do’ that I realised how exceptional she must be. To be so young, just 19, and so at home with technology that you can control it rather than be in awe of its complexity. By the age of 11 Brittany Wenger was teaching herself computer coding, after being inspired by a course at primary school in ‘Futuristic Thinking’. She didn’t find it easy, but she found it ‘a lot of fun’, which says a lot about her. First she persisted in spite of the difficulty, and second she found amusement in that toil and tedious repetition.

Brittany is one of ten teenagers featured on this week’s Radio 1 Stories for having done something that has the potential to change the world. In Brittany’s case she devised a software program that is 99 per cent effective in diagnosing breast cancer.