Exclusive: ZDNET spoke with winners as well as Apple executive Susan Prescott about this year’s Swift Student Challenge.
Students attend Apple WWDC 2023 in Cupertino.
Apple’s Swift Student Challenge has become an anchor of its annual WWDC event for developers, the press, and partners and the Cupertino tech giant added a new wrinkle to the challenge this year by naming 50 « Distinguished Winners » — from among the 350 overall winners. The 50 honorees will get to come to WWDC 2024 in person and participate in a special three-day experience at Apple Park. And judging by the handful of winners we talked to, the level of creativity and productivity is impressive.
The Swift Student Challenge has been happening since 2020 — when I first covered it for CNET — and the most admirable part of it is that it’s not trying to identify the next generation of coding geniuses for Apple to hire. Instead, it’s focused on convincing more people from different backgrounds, different walks of life, different areas of interest, and even different life stages to take an interest in coding and realize they can build apps to solve problems in their communities.
Prescott said that Apple received a record number of submissions this year and that the caliber of the work was « better than ever, » making it more difficult to narrow down the winning submissions, which ended up coming from 35 different countries.
