Recently, Apple announced the winners of the Swift Student Challenge - a total of 350 people from more than 35 countries or regions around the world.
Apple hosts the Swift Student Challenge every year to support and inspire the next generation of developers, entrepreneurs, and entrepreneurs. Students are encouraged to choose their own topics and then create their own app projects.
Unlike previous years, this year, for the first time, Apple has created a new category to recognize 50 outstanding winners who have submitted work that has made a significant contribution to innovation, creativity, social impact or inclusivity.
It is worth mentioning that these winning students will be invited to participate in Apple WWDC24 and a special live experience event at Apple Park. All challenge winners will receive a one-year membership in the Apple Developer Program, a certificate to get certified to develop apps with Swift, and a special gift from Apple. These are undoubtedly great rewards for the winners.
Sina Digital had the opportunity to interact with four of the student winners, the youngest of whom was only 17 years old. Several young winners shared their apps and told us about their design ideas and journeys.
Ma Wentao, a 17-year-old student at North American International High School in Suzhou, is the youngest of the four winners. He wrote an app that simulates the working mechanism and basic functions of an AI neural network. According to Ma Wentao, his work does not use the system's native AI technology, but hand-writes the functions of the AI neural network in the Swift language.
A young developer at just 17 years old
In my conversation with him, I learned that this is not the first time he has participated in the Swift Student Challenge, nor is it the first time he has won an award. In 2022, the "AR Sports Head Movement" app he wrote also won the award, and it was officially launched on the App Store in February this year.
When it comes to the Swift programming language, Ma Wentao said that there are some special things about Swift, when you first switch from C++ to Swift, you will be a little unaccustomed, but practice makes perfect, and more practice will be rewarding. He also reminds newcomers that the Swift language is evolving at a fast pace, so look up to date when looking up to date on the Internet.
Liu Xikai, like Ma Wentao, also participated in the 2022 Swift Student Challenge and won awards. This year, his award-winning project is an app called LiveArt that can extract Apple Music album covers and make them into live wallpapers.
LiveArt Beginner's Guide
To solve the problem that dynamic album covers are not wide enough or tall enough as wallpapers, Liu Xikai uses generative AI technology. He also taught himself how to "fool" the iOS 17 system into determining whether Live Photo can be used as a live wallpaper. "It took me four days of trial and error to get around it. There was only one inconclusive post on the Internet discussing this mechanic, and I read and analyzed it sentence by sentence, plus my own attempts, and had a puzzle game experience... Fortunately, it was unraveled."
When talking about Apple's Swift programming language, Liu Xikai believes that its design is very ingenious and has many advanced concepts in the industry. In addition, Apple provides free tools, stores, and platforms that allow everyone to become an independent developer. "I want to do an iOS developer in the future, [if] I can be a developer at Apple, it would be better."
Xikai Liu, who studied at Northeastern University in the United States
Zhang Haosheng studied at Shanghai Business School and joined the school's iOS Club, where he became acquainted with Swift. The award-winning product in this competition is the first real application he created. The app runs in a puzzle-solving style, requiring players to gradually use more and more modules to assemble circuits to solve the switch cards.
Zhang Haosheng award-winning application
Zhang Haosheng said that he tried to make this game because he hoped to win an award, and on the other hand, he was attracted by the art design of Swift Playgrounds programming teaching, and then made this game suitable for children to learn digital circuit knowledge.
In addition, Zhang Haosheng talked about the benefits of learning to code. He believes that learning the Swift programming language has made his thinking more rigorous and logical, and it has also given him a deeper understanding of programming paradigms.
Li Ruoshan, who also studied at Shanghai Business School, saw Apple's "Everyone Can Code" educational promotional video, and joined the school's iOS Club, hoping to use technology to help the disadvantaged. Last year, she and her team worked together to create an app for visually impaired people to travel, and this time, the entry is an app that combines tangram and virtual reality for children.
Li Ruoshan's award-winning app
Josan Lee is very interested in the content of WWDC24 on artificial intelligence and machine learning. She believes that it will be very valuable to understand how to apply artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies on Apple's platform.
Write at the end:
Every year, Apple organizes the Swift Student Challenge for students, and invites the winners to participate in the WWDC Worldwide Developers Conference, providing them with a broader platform and the opportunity to communicate with outstanding developers from all over the world.
In fact, Apple has always adhered to the concept of "everyone can code", and after years of hard work, this concept has become deeply rooted in the student community. Many young developers have been influenced by this philosophy and have joined the Apple ecosystem, feeding back the ecosystem and benefiting from it.
Enwei Tse, Apple's head of developer relations for Asia Pacific and Europe, said that for many years, Apple has been proud to support coding education and help people around the world learn this important skill.