A SCHOOLBOY computer whizz will travel to the headquarters of one of the world's biggest tech companies after defeating more than 3,500 people in a computer coding competition.

Euan Ong, 15, took part in Google's annual Code-In competition and was one of just three winners from the UK.

The Magdalen College School pupil's prize is a trip to Google's base in California at the end of the summer.

Code-In, is a global online seven-week contest which encourages teenagers aged 13 to 17 to use skills such as coding, documentation and user interface through a series of bite-sized tasks to introduce and submerge young people into open source software development.

This year’s winners, including Euan, come from 12 countries, and were among 3,555 students who competed from 78 different countries.

Euan found the competition online by browsing through Google Blogs.

His mum, Lynette, said: “Euan had noticed if you complete three tasks you get a free T-shirt which had initially sparked his interest into entering the contest.”

Despite entering for the free T-shirt, Euan said: "The competition became more of an importance to me as I completed more tasks”.

He became a Grand Prize Winner after his participation in the online competition.

He competed numerous tasks for his chosen organisation, Sugar Labs, including the creation of a new programming language primarily used in music and art work.

Euan said: "I chose Sugar Labs because of their ethos of helping young people, which strikes well with me as I’m quite passionate about that."

The winners were chosen after each organisation reviewed the work of the 10 students with the highest number of tasks completed during the contest.

Work was reviewed considering the participants' creativity, complexity, quality and community involvement.

Each group of 10 students was narrowed down to five finalists, of which two became Grand Prize Winners and bagged a trip to Google HQ.

Euan's interest in coding was inspired by his father, a professor of computer science at Oxford University.

Euan said: "I became very curious as to how things work.

“When I got my first phone I learnt Java script from tutorials online and then created games to play on my phone."

The competition was held over Christmas, and Euan’s biggest challenge was juggling it with his exams. He said: "I would recommend getting involved in coding if you are an innovator, a creative person, somebody who likes maths or science or somebody who wants to learn how to make the computers do things.”