University of Queensland student wins Apple’s Swift Student Challenge

A North Queensland student is among the winners of an international coding competition organised by the world’s biggest tech company. And he did it in only six days on a $200 ‘piece of crap’ second hand computer.

Nothing seems impossible to 19 year old Mac Rogers.

The Proserpine student, born and bred in the small Whitsunday town, won ‘Student of Year’ only two years ago when leaving high school, and since then he has been collecting world records.

Mr Rogers is the proud titleholder for a World Guiness record in gymnastics, and among the winners of an international coding competition that he had prepared for only in six days.

The Apple Swift Student Challenge is a coding competition where students can submit their creations of an interactive scene using Apple’s Swift programming language.

Mr Rogers, an engineering student at University of Queensland didn’t have an Apple device to submit from, so he found a $200 ‘piece of crap’ of an iMac on marketplace he could experiment with.

Past Proserpine student Mac Rogers, who now studies engineering at UQ, has won both a tech competition and a gymnastics record in the same year. Picture: Supplied

“I had to take like a three-hour bus ride across the other side of Brisbane. It was an ordeal,” Mr Rogers said.

“But it has decent specs for the amount of money I paid for it.”

Mr Rogers then completely forgot about the competition until there was just a week left to submit.

Past Proserpine student Mac Rogers, who now studies engineering at UQ, has won both a tech competition and a gymnastics record in the same year. Picture: Supplied

“Not only have I done no preparation going into it, but I’ve already missed half the time,” Rogers recalled.

But he told himself: “Oh well, I might as well just give it a crack.”

So he went on to learn the Swift coding language in 24 hours as he had never once touched it before.

“And then once I felt like I had a decent grasp of it, I just had a bit of a brainstorming session, picked an idea and just barely spent like the next six days fairly consistently just trying to pull this thing together,” he said.

Mac Rogers, Apple Swift Student Challenge project. Picture: Supplied

Rogers decided that the best idea would be to include his passion for drones into the project and pitched an educational app that would teach its users how drones work.

“The drones use quite a complicated control system to stay in the air,” he said.

“It’s called a PID control (Proportional, Integral, Differential control), and it’s something a lot of people even like, in uni, doing engineering, have quite a hard time wrapping their heads around.

“And so, I sort of made this app stepping you through the sort of a very high level overview of the maths behind it.”

Early this month, Rogers received the good news, he was among the 350 winners out of thousands of participants.

“I was pretty much just under the impression there’s absolutely no way I can win this, like these people are actual software developers who’ve actually used this language for multiple years,” Rogers said adding all the LinkedIn posts he’d read from other winners had been about how it had been ‘years in the making’.

Past Proserpine student Mac Rogers, who now studies engineering at UQ, has won both a tech competition and a gymnastics record in the same year. Picture: Supplied

But it would be wrong to assume Rogers is only talented in tech, as he’s broken multiple records in gymnastics.

Since the age of 13, Rogers would make the drive down to Mackay to train in gymnastics every week.

At 16, he had broken the world record for most muscle-ups conducted on gymnastics rings in an hour, followed by a world record in 16 hours.

Last year, he broke the record again for the 24 hour period and won the world record with 1,308 muscle-ups completed.

No big deal.

Past Proserpine student Mac Rogers, who now studies engineering at UQ, has won both a tech competition and a gymnastics record in the same year. Picture: Supplied

Rogers said his time at Proserpine State High School had been a great place to start learning about engineering and maths, but that ultimately getting good at something is a battle against yourself, just like with gymnastics.

“That’s what my engineering degree is teaching me. It’s how to problem solve when there’s no one who can help you,” he said.

“When you’re just let loose with a little microcontroller and a 3000 page data sheet to go with it, at some point you just have to sort of get into it and start trying things.”