Canberra's coding credentials will have a strong showing at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference on Monday.
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Of 350 students selected from across the world for a special scholarship to attend the conference in San Francisco – eight are Australian and three are from Canberra.
Two Canberra Grammar students Jaxon Kneipp and Damian Camilleri, and Narrabundah College student Shayan Rasaratnam, won a spot after developing their own apps across a range of personal interests.
Jaxon and Damian, both in year 10, met in year 7 when they joined the Junior Code Cadet program at school.
With a number of competition wins already under their belts – GovHack, Young ICT Explorers, and Hackathon ACT – the pair last year began teaching themselves Swift, a programming language, to prepare for the Apple conference. They're already experienced app developers; Damian used his experience of learning to drive to develop My Driving Log – an easy way to keep an online track of hours for learners, and Jaxon created Helping Handbook, an app that enables students to easily log any hours of community service they do. All year 10 students at Canberra Grammar must complete 25 hours of community service and rely on paper log books.
Fittingly, Jaxon was able to count the time spent developing his app towards his community service requirements. He and Damian are well known at the school as tech-wizards who spend considerable time during their lunch breaks helping younger students crack the coding bug. They also mentor classmates.
Meanwhile, Shayan won his place for an app called E'picerie, which aims to help families with their grocery lists. It allows multiple users to add items to a list that can accessed by the group.
His work was inspired by his own family forgetting to buy the wholemeal bread he requested on three consecutive occasions. For the past three months, Shayan has been sharing his programming skills with his younger sister.
The 27th worldwide developers conference will draw people from more than 70 countries.
More than 1000 Apple engineers will man 150 hands-on labs and provide code-level assistance to participants.
Students will attend the keynote opening address, which will be streamed live across the world, and will have access to a range of educational sessions and labs with established app developers and software engineers.
