Bangalore: Meet Alex Foyt, a resident of Albany, New York who is proving the world that it takes nothing-not even age- to become a programming veteran. This 12 year old kid has already created 98 online games in six years.

His titles contain interesting survival challenges that involve evading chickens and carrots falling from the sky. According to Foyt the secrets to his game making skill is a lightweight programming language called Lua. Foyt learned coding with this easy to understand language before he went to master advanced coding tools.

Foyt, who wants to become an independent programmer in says, “I really want to be a computer programmer and build my own codes for a living.” He has recently attended a conference in California sponsored by gaming site Roblox Corp.

Lua, the visual programming language along with other languages like ‘Scratch’ and ‘Alice’ are helping kids around the world to get into programming more easily. Once engaged, these languages motivate them for further learning through playfully experimenting and creating projects, such as interactive animations, games.

“The big thing that is slowing the tech sector down is a lack of labor,” said Steve Cooper to Business insider. Cooper teaches computer science at Stanford University. “If you go to a college job fair, employers will call out and say ’Come over here if you’re a computer scientist.’”

According to Brook Osborne, director of outreach at Duke University’s department of computer science, “ Alice, Scratch and Lua-based platforms help make programming more prevalent among kids and teens and teach them problem-solving skills that translate to other languages such as Python, Java, Ruby and C++.

“When you understand the concepts of programming and how to think like a developer, learning the syntax isn’t a problem anymore,” Osborne said.

There also exists some websites like Codecademy, which offers free online programming classes to people.

According to Steve Cooper, all this could be instrumental in filling what Google and Cisco say is, “A shortfall in engineering talent,” especially in the U.S.