AMMAN — Sham Al-Bdour is 19 and her sister, Jana, is 15.
However, their CVs are long for their age, and they give credit for their
achievements to the way their parents raised them and nurtured their talents.
اضافة اعلان
To start with their latest achievement, the two Jordanian
girls are now the youngest entrepreneurs, with a videogame start-up, Sakura
Games. Their track record has more to tell about their abilities. These young
women have tried more than one career path before settling down in the game
design industry.
When Sham was 14 and Jana 10, they were the youngest
journalists working with the Qatar News Agency. They have also worked as journalists
and producers with many news agencies and local press platforms such as Sawalif
News Agency, Hawa-Amman, Jordan Al-Youm, and others. As part of their job, they
conducted several interviews with different local figures, especially those
concerned with children’s affairs.
They also worked in dubbing TV shows into Arabic and worked
on a voiceover project for UNICEF, demonstrating a talent for voice and acting.
For their parents, all was going according to a plan, the
two sisters and their mother told Jordan News.
“Since our childhood, our parents have always stimulated us
to try different fields so that we would be able to define the appropriate future
career for ourselves. As you know, many young people have ambitions in certain
fields, but they study other subjects and then work in a completely different
industry,” Sham says.
“My husband and I acted out of our duty to identify and
nurture the creative potential of our daughters. Sham was distinguished from an
early age by her tendency towards writing, while Jana was more into
technology,” said Rana Abbadi, their mother.
Already the siblings have decided what their future should
look like.
In 2016, when Jana was only 9 years old, she entered the
realm of programming. Today she is fluent in more than 5 programming languages.
“Sometimes I write to the company that produced the software that we use to
report existing errors,” Jana says. When she was 10 years old, she created her
first website. Jana’s passion for programming was contagious as far as her
sister was concerned, thus Sham jumped onto the bandwagon.
Today Sham is an internationally certified programmer, a
holder of the prestigious Autodesk Maya certification in 3D graphics and
animation. Autodesk has produced many well-known films for Disney and Pixar.
The young woman is one of only three Jordanians who have earned this
recognition.
In 2017, through the King Abdullah II Fund for Development, Sham
and Jana became acquainted with the gaming industry before they started Sakura
Games. As Sham says, the main goal of Sakura Games is “to create educational
games” that are more engaging, making education less of “a burden for
students”. The small enterprise has created 20 games so far, including titles
like “Car Girl Garage” and “Crimson”, which won international prizes. “Crimson”
is an interactive teaching game that is designed for children from 1–5 years,
who learn letters, numbers, colors, and shapes in Arabic and English for
Arabic-language children.
The road was not easy. In the early days of Sakura Games,
the written content about the games industry in Arabic was almost non-existent.
The entrepreneurs also faced fierce competition.
But their hard work paid off. The young businesspeople now
enjoy people’s support and international recognition, as they, for example,
twice won the second place in the Big Indie Pitch Award.
Today, Sham is a first-year university student. She studies
computer science and is one of 50 students who have received the “King Abdullah
II Technical Education” scholarship at Al-Hussein Technical University, one of
the initiatives of the Crown Prince Foundation. She says that she has big
dreams. She hopes she will have the opportunity to use her talent in
presentation and journalism, along with her experience in the game industry, to
produce press materials specialized in technology and the game industry. As for
Jana, she is in the ninth grade and aspires to receive enough support to excel
in networking and white-hat hacking and develop augmented and virtual reality
games to make a difference in the quality of children’s education.
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