Apple Swift challenges students worldwide to build an original software playground using the Swift coding language each year as part of the Worldwide Developers Conference. Apple upped the number of winners from 350 given out in previous years to 375 this year so that even more kids may take part in the celebration and be honoured for their creativity and inventiveness.
Susan Prescott, Apple’s vice president of Global Developer Relations, remarked, “We are surprised by the talent we see from the young coders that join our Swift Student Competition.” The entries this year “demonstrated the next generation’s readiness to embrace new technologies and tools and use them in novel and creative ways, as well as their dedication to developing solutions that will better our lives.”
The challenge winners will be among those present both physically and virtually when WWDC23 begins on June 5 to view the keynote, events, labs, and activities made accessible to the world’s Apple developers this year.
Their app playgrounds span a wide range of subjects, including health, sports, entertainment, and the environment, and they represent more than 30 different nations and regions. Yet, all of the winners have one trait: they are leveraging coding to communicate their hobbies with the world. Coding presents Asmi Jain, Yemi Agesin, and Marta Michelle Caliendo, first-time winners, with the chance to not only carve out a distinctive professional path but also to assist others along the way.
Swift Student Challenge winner Asmi Jain
Asmi Jain, a 20-year-old student at Medi-Caps University in Indore, India, learned that her friend’s uncle needed brain surgery when she was there. He had facial paralysis and misaligned eyes as a consequence. Jain acted quickly and created her acclaimed playground to monitor a user’s eye movements as they attempt to follow a ball as it moves across the screen. While it was inspired by her friend’s uncle, Jain hopes that others with a variety of eye illnesses and injuries will be able to utilize the playground to help strengthen the eye muscles.
According to Jain, it was crucial for him to build an app playground that would have a beneficial influence on people’s lives. “My next objective is to gather feedback, make sure it’s useful and easy to use, and then publish it on the App Store. I intend to eventually develop it into a therapeutic tool that folks like my friend’s uncle may use at their own speed, and I want to extend it so that it helps strengthen all of the facial muscles.
Jain’s ambition to utilize coding to address issues in the healthcare industry stems from her many years of voluntary work. She recently established a forum at her institution with the help of a few other students so that their peers may get assistance with challenging coding issues.
According to Jain, feeling like you’re a part of something greater inspires you to work more. “I can make things using coding that benefit my friends and the community. Also, it offers me a strong feeling of freedom.
Moving to various countries as a child would be difficult for many young people, but Yemi Agesin, then 21 years old, considered it a privilege. Before moving back to the United States when he was a teenager, his family resided in Germany, Nigeria, Belgium, and England.
Swift Student Challenge winner Yemi Agesin
Agesin, who will begin his last year at Kennesaw State University in Georgia this September, claims that travelling exposes one to a wealth of knowledge about the globe. “I believe it actually helps me,” the author claims, “since I constantly try to consider and design for a broad variety of views when I’m making things.”
A first-person baseball game that references two of Agesin’s hobbies, sports and filmmaking, is the winning software playground. These hint at both his immediate plans as well as his long-term objectives. He is now scripting a film about a baseball star that he will make this summer.
Agesin adds, “I may feel like an artist while I’m coding; my keyboard is my canvas and the code editor is my paintbrush. I’m creating a sports game where you play as a team and compete against other players in real-time for my next two projects. To assist filmmakers in seeing their graphics and effects while they are filming on an iPhone, I am also developing an app that will employ augmented reality.
It’s hardly surprising that Agesin is most eager to learn more about ARKit and RealityKit when he attends WWDC23. He’s excited to add them to his expanding toolkit and see how they may support him in turning his concepts into useful applications. Agesin says, “By utilizing programming, I can create worlds that others can utilize while also creating a job that combines my loves. “I feel fortunate and happy to be in a moment and era when I can do that,” the speaker said.
Swift Student Challenge winner Marta Michelle Caliendo
Marta Michelle Caliendo, 25, believes that the future is more important than the past when it comes to her interest in palaeontology, the scientific study of life via fossils. Caliendo, who is pursuing a natural sciences degree at the University of Naples Federico II while attending the Apple Development School in Naples, believes that dinosaurs should serve as a continual reminder to all of us to protect biodiversity. Coding enables me to come up with fresh methods to communicate that idea.
As Caliendo just learned Swift in September, her award-winning app, playground, is a memory game with anatomically accurate illustrations of dinosaur fossils that she created in Procreate on an iPad.
“When I first started at the school, I used Swift for the first time, and it was amazing because it was so straightforward and natural,” recalls Caliendo. I like this programming language since it enables me to express myself via my code in some way.
