Teen who had trouble with math creates app to help, meets Apple CEO Tim Cook

SAN FRANCISCO -- As any school kid will tell you, math homework is tough, but one Bay Area teen decided to do something about it.

His efforts scored him a pass to Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference for zero dollars and zero cents.

"We're inviting in the next generation of developers. We've awarded 350 scholarships this year," said Apple CEO Tim Cook.

You might think scholarships are for kids with straight As, but not in this case.

Amit Kalra's a whiz with technology, but math just wasn't his thing.

"I was struggling in geometry class last year, and like there's too many formulas to remember," Kalra said. "Just because you're good at something else doesn't mean you're good at school."

What he is good at is coding. He's been doing it since he was nine, so he built an app.

He loaded with formulas for every high school math class and released it on the app store. It's called 6284 Calc.

Kalra said almost all of his friends use the app. Nevermind the bragging rights, the app won him a scholarship to Apple's Worldwide Developers' Conference.

"It feels really good. Like I didn't know if they would ever like know about my app ever," Kalra said.

It all comes as Apple makes a big push to get more young people learning to code, and not with a beginner language, but with Apple's own programming language, Swift.

"Swift is powerful but it's also simple and it's approachable, so it can be your very first programming language," Cook said.

Cook unveiled a free app that teaches Swift that's aimed at classrooms.

Amit says he learned it fast. "It's really easy, it's basically like English," he said.

Now, he's at the conference all week learning more coding skills and meeting some famous faces. "I got my badge signed by Tim Cook and I also met Craig Federighi inside right now," he said.

Kalra's now hard at work improving his app for the Apple Watch, which he admits is awfully tempting.

"You know if you're in a test and you forget a formula, just like pull it out... My teacher keeps a close eye on me," Kalra said.