Though she is only 16 years old, Neha Sharma of Waikiki is already a budding computer programmer.

Sharma, a volunteer at the Waikiki Aquarium, recently launched a free, long-term tide prediction app called TideTracker that’s available on Android. Eventually, she plans to make it available on iOS, which works on Apple devices. She received an award of recognition earlier this month from Honolulu Mayor Kirk Caldwell for creating the app.

While trying to figure out Hawaii’s tides several years in advance, Sharma found that the information wasn’t easily accessible. When she searched via Google, it took her up to 10 page clicks to find the information she needed, she said, so she started thinking about how to make predicting tides more efficient.

“I thought it would be a nice challenge to see if I could make this long-term tide information more easily accessible by providing it as a smartphone app,” she said.

Sharma, a junior at Laurel Springs High School, an accredited private online school based in Ojai, Calif., created the app for fun after volunteering at the aquarium.

The app, available at the Google Play store, uses data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s marine stations to provide tidal information up to 10 years in advance for locations around the globe, including points in Hawaii. The app allows users to find high- and low-tide information by day, month or year, viewable as graphs.

In the future, Sharma hopes to add more features, including phone notifications, a tutorial for first-time users and an option that offers current tide information.

Sharma’s dad is a software engineer and her mom is a teacher, but she created the app on her own after completing online classes and homework assignments. Not surprisingly, math and science are her favorite subjects.

She’s been coding since she was 12 and took an advanced placement computer science course last year. Though she had no previous experience programming for an Android device, she followed a developer’s guide online, watched tutorials and looked at other projects for ideas.

“A lot of it is trial and error,” she said. “I figured it out, eventually.”

Sharma said she is inspired by entrepreneurs and philanthropists like Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and expects to major in computer programming in college with the hope of starting her own company one day.

Whereas a surfer or recreational beachgoer may typically want to know the tides for the week, she believes long-term tidal information may be useful for researchers or institutions like the Waikiki Aquarium that need to plan events.

Also, she hopes to encourage young girls to program.

“Girls are definitely underrepresented in technology,” she said. “A lot of people my age are averse to the idea of programming because either it’s too boring or looks too complicated. It’s actually fun to build something.”

More information is available at tidetracker.wordpress.com.