Dunstan High School’s (DHS) James Avenell has been selected for the Hyundai Pinnacle Programme (HPP) which provides support and mentoring for New Zealand’s future leaders.

Having just finished his year 11 exams on Thursday (November 17), James has plenty of reasons to celebrate.

As far as he knows he is the first DHS student to be accepted to the HPP.

“Mrs Hitchman sent an email to me saying ‘have a look at this…’ so I applied.

“I did think I had a chance… but I submitted my entry in mid-September and then I didn’t hear anything until the start of this month,” James said.

Early last week when he found he had been successful he threw his hands up in the air and quickly told his mum and dad, who were “ecstatic” for him.

James is one of 14 rangitahi selected for HPP’s first stage, from a pool of 120 students aged 15-18 from across New Zealand.

He will go on a ten day trip on the Spirit of Adventure yacht early next year, and will travel to Auckland for a day's induction mid December with other stage one recipients. 

The teen is a keen computer programmer and balances his passion for “having a play with something to see how it works” with helping people and problem solving.

Three years ago he built an automatic weed spraying robot, which uses a camera to detect weeds and spray them and runs on to a computer programme James created.

The original weed spraying robot James made

The robot is still used on his parents Paul and Trish Avenell’s property to keep on top of the weeds in a lucerne paddock.

One of his latest projects was inspired by an experience he had while tramping in Stewart Island. 

Together with his Venture Scouts tramping party, they arrived at a Department of Conservation (DOC) hut which could not be booked prior, to find too few beds to accommodate all the trampers.

He has built a website Intent Huts NZ to fill this gap for ‘first come first serve backcountry huts’ and has launched it via tramping Facebook groups.

The hits on his original post have topped 3,000 and it's been shared widely online. James said his end goal is to get DOC to put it on their website.

Together with business partner Greg Bodecker he’s working on a new business venture called Kekule Games.

James works part time at Alexandra based Bodecker Scientific as a programmer

On their website they say they are striving to make computer programming into a sport with players uploading their code, with continual competitions to find the champion of game strategy and python programming.

James said he is always busy doing something, if it is not writing code it might be hunting or tramping.

“[Above all] I like tinkering with things… And I’m interested to see how [the HPP] goes.”

The HPP was created in 2004 and has alumni such as Storm Eru, Peter Urlich, Kate McIlroy, and Adam Hall among its honour roll.

It is made up of three stages; stage one focused on self discovery and goal setting (including the Spirit of Adventure trip), stage two is personal development (including a 21 day Outward Bound experience) and stage three covers mentoring and guidance (with a four day Kai Waho - unique Māori, cultural and wilderness experience).

For more information see HPP website and check out Kekule Games.