I have a very similar story. I had an internship in high school doing bio research at a university. They basically wanted me to spend my whole summer counting cells with a digital microscope. I got bored pretty quickly and decided to write a program to automate the process and count cells for me. It worked out and the lab loved it. I went on to do a bunch of science fairs, including ISEF (Intel). It was doing that which really got me interested in tech and comp sci.

Thanks for Vagrant! wish I had that years ago.