13-Year-Old Shani Zuniga Designs Energy Saving Home Climate App #WomenInSTEM

Who says you have to be an adult to invent something useful? 13-year-old Shani Zuniga, together with her father, Gabi, and their neighbor Danny Eizips have created a cloud-controlled home heating and cooling device called Ventix. Unlike Nest, which controls the overall climate in the entire house, the Arduino-based Ventix can be used to control the climate in each individual room by opening or closing individual air vents.

For the Disrupt SF Hackathon, Zuniga enlisted his 13-year old daughter, Shani, as the designer for the app that controls the entire system.  While she’s been learning to create graphics for awhile now, this was her first ever hackathon.  Shani designed the entire app for both iPad and iPhone and is now working on one for Android.