Indian student wins scholarship to Apple conference

An Indian boy is among three students in Australia who have won scholarships to attend Apple's prestigious Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco next week.

Deepen Kumar, Ben Maliel and Christopher Seidl of Canberra Boys Grammar School will participate in the conference known for Apple's keynote presentations on new products.

The conference will provide the high-school students an opportunity to rub shoulders with the brightest minds in coding, according to Canberra Times.

Canberra Grammar's Information and Software Technology teacher Matthew Purcell said he was delighted that the hard work of his students has 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.

Deepan said programming helped students develop creative ideas that could solve many of the challenges society faces and should be implemented in more schools.

"The scholarship gives us a ticket to attend the conference in San Francisco which is extremely difficult to attend with tickets costing more than Australian dollar 2,000 and selling out within minutes," said 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."

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."

All the three students believed coding had played an important part in their own education and helped them with other subjects such as science and maths.

Image: A man clicks the Apple logo with his Samsung mobile. Photograph: Reuters