2020: The Year It All Started

I was 9 years old, turning 10 in December. Born on December 6, 2010, in Oman, I had spent my whole life going to ISGI, loving maths, and being a normal kid. Then COVID hit, and nothing was normal anymore.

Lockdown Hits Oman

March 2020 — the world shut down. Schools closed. Oman went into full lockdown. Suddenly I was stuck at home with my family, staring at my laptop for online classes and then staring at my screen for everything else. Online school was honestly kind of funny looking back — half the class had their cameras off, the WiFi would die at the worst moments, and nobody was really learning anything. But also? No commute, no uniform, and you could eat lunch whenever you wanted. Mehal once said "online school best part" and honestly, she was not wrong.

The Gaming Era

With nowhere to go and nothing to do, gaming became my entire life. Fortnite specifically. Me and Vivaan M were grinding Fortnite like it was our job. He still talks about it — "prime Fortnite during lockdown" — and he is right. Those were peak gaming days. We would hop on after online school ended, play for hours, rage quit, and then come right back. When you are 9 and stuck inside, your squad is everything. The wins felt massive, the losses felt personal, and "one more game" always turned into four more hours.

But here is the thing — while I was playing all these games, a question started forming in the back of my head that would change everything: "How are these games made?"

MindChamp and Scratch

I asked my parents, and they said coding. So they signed me up for MindChamp coding classes. I was 9. My first language was Scratch — the block-based visual programming thing. At first I thought it was kind of basic, just dragging and dropping blocks. But then I realized I could make actual games with it. Like, things that people could play. I could make characters move, add scoring, build levels. That blew my mind.

I started building early projects immediately. Little games, animations, interactive stories. Nothing groundbreaking, but for a 9-year-old who had only ever consumed games, the idea that I could create them was revolutionary. Every project taught me something new — loops, conditionals, variables. I did not know it at the time, but I was learning the fundamentals of computer science through colourful blocks.

The Real Spark

2020 was not just "the COVID year" for me. It was the year I went from being an avid gamer to someone who wanted to understand how things worked. That curiosity — "how is this made?" — is the thread that connects everything I have done since. The lockdown gave me the boredom, the boredom gave me the question, and MindChamp gave me the first answer.

Looking back, I am genuinely grateful for that year. Without it, I might have just kept gaming forever and never discovered that building things is way more fun than playing them.

See also: Early Projects | Lockdown Memories | Gaming | Origin Story | Life in Oman