Half of the Australian students who received a scholarship to attend Apple's annual Worldwide Developer Conference live in Canberra - and they all go to the same school.
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Five Canberra Grammar students left the ACT this week for San Jose in the heart of the Silicone Valley to meet and learn from more than 1000 Apple engineers.
![Canberra Grammar students Jack Carey, Year 10, Zack Noyes, Year 9, Joseph Fergusson, Year 11, Marcus Gellel, Year 10, and George Dan, Year 11, who have won scholarships to attend Apple's web developer conference in the US. Photo: Rohan Thomson Canberra Grammar students Jack Carey, Year 10, Zack Noyes, Year 9, Joseph Fergusson, Year 11, Marcus Gellel, Year 10, and George Dan, Year 11, who have won scholarships to attend Apple's web developer conference in the US. Photo: Rohan Thomson](/images/transform/v1/crop/frm/silverstone-ct-migration/daeb4247-52a6-4319-9fdb-2349532d1edc/r0_0_2000_1334_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg)
Year 9 Zack Noyes, Year 10 students Jack Carey and Marcus Gellel and Year 11 students Joseph Fergusson and George Dan will join Canberra Grammar digital innovation head Matthew Purcell for the June 5 to 9 conference.
The boys wowed judges by creating interactive apps that gave information about themselves.
![A screenshots of the app created by Canberra Grammar students Zack Noyes. Photo: Supplied A screenshots of the app created by Canberra Grammar students Zack Noyes. Photo: Supplied](/images/transform/v1/crop/frm/silverstone-ct-migration/3e0b4da1-c077-4385-a7fa-fde39d712f7a/r0_0_2000_1093_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg)
Mr Purcell paid tribute to the hard work of the students, each of whom has participated in Code Cadets since Year 7, a voluntary after-school coding program.
"It was a fair bit of work for them and some fairly stressful afternoons in the school doing debugging on them but they did it because they enjoy doing it so I don't really think they saw it as a drag to do it," Mr Pucell said.
"They also all learnt new things so they used technologies and frameworks that they've never used before because they wanted to challenge themselves and do something they'd never done and something new and something that impressed the judges."
Zack, who wants to one day work in coding, said he hoped to learn about new technologies at the conference.
![A screenshots of the app created by Canberra Grammar student Jack Carey. Photo: Supplied A screenshots of the app created by Canberra Grammar student Jack Carey. Photo: Supplied](/images/transform/v1/crop/frm/silverstone-ct-migration/6ba7ae2a-ae21-4431-bedd-5e4767e74db5/r0_0_1606_1164_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg)
"At WWDC, Apple usually announces new technologies that could be introduced," he said.
"I hope to be able to learn more about these technologies by talking to people who have been part of creating them. I also want to learn more about technologies that I have already used."
The conference, to be held at McEnery Convention Center near Apple's new headquarters, will represent Mr Purcell's eighth.
He said: "I think what's really special about WWDC is the people that you meet there and also being able to talk with the engineers from Apple who have built the technologies that you're using.
"[Say] you've been using a technology for the past year or two years and you have these questions about how it works or how to make your code better and all these problems, the ability to actually go and track down and speak to the person who wrote that is just invaluable because they wrote it and you can't get much more of an authoritative source on it than that."