You’re never too young to change the world.

So when tragedy struck her California neighborhood, a 12-year-old decided she would make sure it doesn’t happen again.

Shanya Gill had never seen a fire destroy a building before. So when the Holder Country Inn restaurant burned down last summer, the young girl was scared.

But that fear motivated her. And it also led to a $25,000 prize.

“I had never really experienced something like that before,” she said. Thankfully, no one was injured, but the restaurant was destroyed.

It hit close to my heart because it was part of my community.”

So the seventh-grader went to work on an idea to help warn people of a fire, faster than a smoke detector does.

“They had smoke detectors, and yet it still burned down,” she said of the restaurant. “(But) with an early warning system, we could save thousands of lives every year.”

Shanya Gill recently won the top prize at the Thermo Fisher Scientific Junior Innovators Challenge in D.C. for her fire-detection device. Photo by Jessica Yurinko/Society for Science

The young scientist got to work on creating a fire-detection system that used a thermal camera connected to a tiny computer. Shanya programmed it to have the camera be able to distinguish between the heat source of people versus stationary hot objects, like a stove.

The device, she said, will identify a heat source, and then if there is no human presence for 10 minutes, an alert is sent by text.

Shanya’s prototype was able to detect heat sources 97% of the time, and humans 98% of the time. It also successfully sent text messages 97% of the time.

With some minor improvements, Shanya said her device would become even more accurate, as well as affordable the more traditional smoke detectors in homes and businesses.

“In order to deploy at a large scale, I am doing experiments where the device would be placed on the ceiling like a smoke detector,” she said.

Her device won her the top prize at the Thermo Fisher Scientific Junior Innovators Challenge in D.C. The national middle school STEM competition encourages kids to “solve the grand challenges of the 21st century,” Thermo Fisher Scientific said in a statement.

Shanya working on a team activity during the Thermo Fisher Scientific Junior Innovators Challenge, which took place Oct. 27 to Nov. 2. Photo by Lisa Fryklund/Society for Science

“I had definitely worked really hard to get here,” Shanya said. She said she plans to put the award money toward college.

“I had really big setbacks in my project, and almost all of them were related to code,” Shanya said. “I had two designs, and my first design completely failed. It was a really big barricade I had to go through.”

As she worked through it, her coding capabilities improved markedly, Shanya said, and “something that really helped me not give up was cherishing the little victories along the way.”

The young girl said that in addition to science, she loves sports and crafting, as well as teaching younger children. Shanya wants to be a biomedical engineer one day.

“By combining my love for biology, desire to make a difference and passion for innovation, biomedical engineering is the perfect fit for me,” she said.

Her plan for her fire device is to bring the product to market, and donate the profits to charities that support fire victims.

“I want to stick to my passions and try to make a positive difference,” Shanya said.

Watch below to see how this amazing creation works!

Sources: Washington Post | NBC24