Students attend Apple WWDC 2023 in Cupertino.
Apple
Apple Swift Student Challenge has become the highlight of the annual WWDC event for developers, press and partners, and the Cupertino tech giant has added a new challenge to this year’s challenge by naming 50 “Outstanding winner” — among 350 overall winners. 50 honorees will go directly to WWDC 2024 and participate in a special three-day experience at Apple Park. And be judged based on a handful of winners that we spoke with, the level of creativity and productivity was impressive.
The Swift Student Challenge has been running since 2020 — when I first presented it to CNET — and the most admirable part is that it doesn’t try to identify the next generation of programming geniuses for Apple to hire. Instead, it focuses on convincing more people from different backgrounds, different walks of life, different areas of interest, and even different life stages to be interested in coding and realized they could build apps to solve problems in their community.
In an interview with ZDNET, Susan Prescott, Apple’s vice president of worldwide developer relations, said: “We don’t do student challenges to ensure that everyone who participates becomes software engineers. Some of them will. But we also want all of them to be comfortable with coding and know that they can build an application world in its own way.”
Prescott said that Apple received a record number of submissions this year and that the quality of the work was “better than ever,” making it more difficult to narrow down the winning submissions, which ultimately came from 35. different countries. When it launched this year’s contest in NovemberApple specifically relies on the Everyone Can Code resource to encourage participation from people beyond just students in computer science and software engineering programs.
Also: Apple confirms WWDC 2024 on June 10 – Will AI prevail?
ZDNET got the chance to chat with two of the US winners — AJ Nettles from Birmingham, Alabama and Dezmond Blair from Detroit, Michigan. Both entered the competition for the first time this year, building apps based on first-hand experiences from their lives and completing their apps in an impressively short amount of time.
Nettles, a Masters student in cyber security at the University of Birmingham, initially wanted to build an app to support nurses but realized he didn’t have the data for that. Instead, he drew on his experience with security issues and data breaches to write a guide to creating better passwords. The iPhone app itself also serves as a basic password manager, using Secure Enclave on Apple devices to store passwords locally and securely, and using biometric authentication to access them . Nettles wrote the app in three weeks after learning about the contest in February.
The competition helped inspire him to start his own app making business.
“I’m planning on starting a business, but not necessarily a big one,” Nettles said [but]… just creating things like apps usually costs money [through a subscription and] Find a way to reduce that price so it will be cheaper for the average user. To get away from the subscription model and get back to one-time purchases.”
Blair, a member of Apple Developer Academy in Michigan, learned about the contest from one of his mentors in the program but only had a few days to create his app. He fell in love with mountain biking and wanted to build an app that would help people feel the thrill of flying down trails, blasting through hills, and hitting some descents steep. So he took a 360-degree camera and attached it to his helmet and handle bars to capture footage and turn it into an augmented reality experience in an iPad app called MTB XTREME.
Growing up in Canton, Michigan, Blair’s family lived in a trailer park and had virtually no working computer or Internet connection, so the 22-year-old focused on learning industrial skills. technology as quickly as possible to support his family. In addition to studying at the Apple Developer Academy, he founded his own company, Easy Dez It, to help people design app prototypes. And he plans to eventually bring the XTREME MTB to the Apple Vision Pro.
Blair is also one of three students on the list of 50 Outstanding Winners Apple introduced it in its own article about the program. The other two are Elena Galluzzo, a Canadian who designed an all-in-one care app for the elderly, and Jawaher Shaman, a 27-year-old in Saudi Arabia, who designed an app to help children overcome difficulty speaking.
Prescott reports that applications focused on AI, machine learning and spatial computing were also strong trends among this year’s submitters and winners.
