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Three year 10 students at Canberra Boys Grammar School have won scholarships to attend Apple's prestigious Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco next week. The conference, which has become known for Apple's keynote presentations on new products, will provide the students an opportunity to rub shoulders with the brightest minds in coding. Unlike many high-school students, Ben Maliel, Deepan Kumar and Christopher Seidl have already thought of establishing successful careers with either Google or Apple. Canberra Grammar's Information and Software Technology teacher Matthew Purcell said he was delighted the hard work of his students had been rewarded by Apple. "It's an extraordinary achievement because Apple only offers 250 of these scholarships worldwide and we've got three of them at this school," he said. To win the scholarship, the three students needed to code their own iPhone or iPad applications and devote their school holidays to the task. "The scholarship gives us a ticket to attend the conference in San Francisco which is extremely difficult to attend with tickets costing more than $2000 and selling out within minutes," said Christopher Seidl. "I had been interested in attending for a long time and Mr Purcell recommended I have a go at getting a scholarship, so I started working on it from about term two last year." Mr Purcell, who has attended the conference for the past eight years with the goal of bringing his own students, said Australian schools should not shy away from teaching coding. "It does play a positive role but we do need to have a degree of caution and approach it carefully to make sure it will be pitched the right way and be a success," he said. "A lot of that has to do with getting qualified teachers into our school to do that. "When the student knows more than the teacher does it just reduces the credibility of the subject and the profession generally." All three of the students believed coding had played an important part of their own education and helped them with other subjects such as science and maths. "Programming is always based in logic and teaches you skills that can be applied to other subjects," Mr Maliel said. "Being able also gives you a lot of power at a time when most things come to you as default by software." Mr Deepan said programming helped students developed creative ideas that could solve many of the challenges society faces and should be implemented in more schools. His classmate Mr Seidl said his interest in coding had developed as a hobby although his recent success had prompted him to contemplate a career in technology and development. "I'm really looking forward to going to the keynote sessions where they release all their new projects and information sessions about development, which should allow me to get better building apps," he said.

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