Freshman Matthew Turk is not your average high school student. When you ask most secondary school students what they plan to do in life, you will not usually find a straightforward answer. Turk knows.

This gifted coder, aspiring entrepreneur, and active inventor has crafted inventions, created apps, and become an entrepreneur at age 15, and he never stops thinking of what he can do in the future.

Turk has not taken technology for granted. He has been making apps for the App Store for a couple of years already. Three are available in the app store – a fact-generating app called “Astrophacts,” a game called “Bubblesurge,” and an app that helps you memorize the irrational constant number, Euler’s number.

In “Bubblesurge,” bubbles appear on a white background. The object of the game is to tap them continually to keep them from leaving the screen, with extra bubbles being added throughout the game.

Turk’s apps are a product of his innovativeness, and his ability to create things from the skills he has learned from coding. The game Bubblesurge seems like a straightforward game, but it required a lot of creativity, coding ability, and research to create. Fifth grader Alex Fiddler said, “I liked how you could bounce the bubbles back and forth between two fingers.”

Turk strives to achieve his goals for his app-making pursuits.

“After I made a few apps on the App Store, I made a goal for myself to make something that could be on the front of the app store,” Turk said. “Right now I am in the middle of making some apps. One is a native app for websites, a web application. Another one I am working on is for an ios application.”

So far, Turk has worked alone on apps, and he has not gotten to the level where he can start outsourcing and collaborating with other developers.

Turk’s passion and interest in coding has developed over time. “The way I started programming was when I was eight,and I went to a camp,” Turk said, “and we learned how to use NXT robots, and program them to move around and stuff.” Turk forgot coding for a while, but in fifth grade he became interested in HTML, a coding language, and started learning it on the online site “Codecademy.”

Turk started a middle school astrophysics club when he was in eighth grade. He has continued it as a freshman, extending it to high schoolers. Turk covers many topics in the club, and has even taken the club to watch scientist Neil DeGrasse Tyson speak.

Turk’s parents have been very supportive of him, and have not wanted to interfere with his ambitions and work. “Matthew has learned various coding languages and desires to learn more coding languages and techniques as he discovers new ideas such as apps, websites and musical instruments that require programming,” Turk’s father Jonathan Turk said. “He is very determined to learn more about coding and programming but sometimes finds it difficult to find as many instructors and mentors as he would like.”

Turk lost his ambition after fifth grade, but was inspired one day in November of seventh grade while walking around the Gold Coast. “I had this great epiphany,” Turk said, “that maybe there was some way I could actually make something that could have a difference in the world, even if I’m just a teenager.”

Turk’s motivation to make apps didn’t just have to relate to making a difference in the world.

“It wasn’t just about making money or apps,” Turk said, “I just wanted to build things, so I started drawing and inventing things.I ended up taking an invention to a product development firm over the summer. Even though the idea never got off the ground, it really got the ball rolling.”

Soon after this, Turk started finding opportunities around the city for coding, as well as learning how to code from websites online. He started to learn a new coding language that had just been released: Swift.

Turk began to connect all of his interests to entrepreneurship. “I really wanted to create things,” Turk said, “because my dad knows a lot about this stuff, and he told me, ‘you’re not going to be successful just having ideas. You need to know how to push that out to make people wanna reach into their pocket, and buy stuff from you, so you can continue to get recognition for your work.’”

Anne Marie Fries, eighth grade science teacher, was Turk’s advisor last year. Turk reached out to her for assistance with his endeavors. “It was clear from the start that he had a lot of interests outside of school, of ambition for ideas, of projects, and things he worked on,” Fries said. “He would often come in and talk of all these projects, ideas, and apps, and he was always branching out and connecting with people outside of school he could work with.”

Turk has a plan. “I want to have my own personality,” Turk said. “I don’t want to just be the next Mark Zuckerberg. I want to be Matthew Turk. I want to be my own distinguished figure. Some people are born with an innate sense of ambition that follows them everywhere. I feel like I am doing myself a disservice by not working as hard as I can to do these things.”