Jason Hiner/ZDNET
Coding skills can be applied to tackle real-world problems. Apple’s Swift Student Challenge supports the next generation of developers, creators, and entrepreneurs who want to get involved.
Rising to the challenge
Apple’s Swift Student Challenge invites students around the globe, as young as 13, to embrace their coding skills and use Swift — the coding language for all Apple platforms — to create an app playground that tackles a real-world problem of their choosing.
“It’s really a way for people around the world, people with different experiences, different backgrounds, different ages, to be able to really showcase their passion, their creativity, and their coding skills in a way that’s really relevant for them,” said Susan Prescott, Apple’s VP of developer relations, education, and enterprise.
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Out of thousands of global applicants, 350 students are selected as winners. The prize? More development opportunities, including a one-year membership in the Apple Developer Program and a pair of AirPods Max.
Apple then selects 50 distinguished winners whose work has risen to the top of the applications. These 50 students earn a visit to Cupertino for WWDC. Conor Ebeling and Tamera Middlebrooks, whose coding projects were dedicated to helping people with disabilities, are among the distinguished winners.
ZDNET spoke to Ebeling and Middlebrooks to learn more about their apps, journeys, experiences, and advice. Here’s what they said.
Helping others communicate
Apple/ZDNET
Ebeling first got into coding when he learned about the Swift Student Challenge in the sixth grade, becoming a self-taught programmer. He used funds saved from shoveling snow and mowing lawns to buy a $350 used MacBook Air on eBay, which he intended to use to apply to the Swift Student Challenge.
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He didn’t apply until the past cycle, nine years later, when he was a sophomore computer science student at Purdue University. His app playground, Herald, enables people who can’t speak verbally to control a keyboard using facial muscles and eye movements.
“The main reason why I got into programming in the first place is to be able to help people,” said Ebeling.
The inspiration for this project came from an interview with Stephen Hawking. Ebeling saw Hawking use a combination of hardware and software to communicate without using his voice. He became determined to find a way to mimic that experience on an Apple device, which he executed using modern large language models.
Building a solution to a familiar problem
Apple/ZDNET
Middlebrooks is a student at Apple’s Detroit Developer Academy, and she created SwayApp, a balance-support tool. The inspiration for her coding project came from her own experience with vestibular migraines and her struggle to find software that could help.
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Beyond building a practical tool to help people cope with balance disorders, one of Middlebrooks’ biggest motivations was to let people going through similar experiences know they weren’t alone and that there was a community to support them.
“With my projects dealing with people who have balance disorders like myself, I felt like it was really important to remind them that their experience is not in a bubble, it’s something other people can relate to, that there is help and support for them,” said Middlebrooks.
Middlebrooks said the experience served as a reminder of the unbridled potential when you work on a project that is both something you are passionate about and have a personal connection to.
Future applicants
If you are interested in applying for the next cycle, Ebeling and Middlebrooks suggest giving it a shot.
“If you want to learn to code, you absolutely can,” said Middlebrooks. “There are resources and people who are willing to support you and help you.”
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Ebeling said that, if you want to start learning how to code, Swift is the “perfect” language because of its open-ended nature and built-in libraries, which helped him go from “zero to 100, like, really quickly.”
Apple also offers many online resources to support people learning Swift, such as the Learn to Code Apple site, which has tutorials, forums, and a link to register for updates on student developer events and programming.
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