May 8, 2025
UPDATE
Local inspiration, world impact: meet four of the winners of this year Swift Student Challenge
Each year, the Swift Student Challenge invites students from around the world to follow their curiosity and explore their creativity via original application playgrounds built with an intuitive and easy to learn fast coding language. With a starry sky undertaken by a telescope in Nuevo León, Mexico, a pack of discovered cards in a Japanese play shop, inspirations behind the 350 winning bids of this year cover the world, representing 38 countries and regions, and incorporating a wide range of tools and technologies.
“We are always inspired by the talent and the prospect that young developers bring to the Swift Student Challenge,” said Susan Prescott, vice-president of relations with the world’s developers of Apple. “This year’s winners show exceptional skills to transform significant ideas into application playgrounds that are innovative, punchy and thoughtful way – and we are delighted to support their trip when they continue to create applications that will help shape the future.”
Fifty distinguished winners were invited to attend the World Developer Conference (WWDC) in Apple Park, where they will participate in a specially organized experience of three days. During the week, the winners will have the opportunity to watch the Keynot live on June 9, to learn from Apple experts and engineers and to participate in the laboratories.
Many winners this year have been inspired by their local communities, creating powerful tools designed to have an impact on a global scale. Below, the distinguished winners Taiki Hamamoto, Marina Lee, Luciana Ortiz Nolasco and Nahom Worku plunge into their Playgrounds application and the real problems they aim to solve, demonstrating the coding power to conduct a lasting change.
When Taiki Hamamoto, 22, came across a Hanafuda deck in his local game shop, he was intrigued. He had grown up playing the traditional Japanese cards game with family members, and he thought it would be easy to recruit friends for a nostalgic or two round – but that was not the case.
“I found that very few people of my generation know how to play in Hanafuda, although it is a must of Japanese culture,” explains Hamamoto, a recent graduate of the prefective university of Kumamoto. “I thought that if there was a way to facilitate reading a smartphone, it could be possible to spread Hanafu, not only in Japan but also in the world.”
Thanks to its winning application field, Hanafuda Tactics, novices can become familiar with the rules of the game and the cards themselves. The colored bridges decorated with 48 cards, inspired by the reverence for the nature of Japan, are divided into 12 costumes – one for each month of the year – and each illustrated by a seasonal plant. There are many ways to play, but one of the most popular variations is Koi-Koi, where players try to form special cards combinations called yaku.
While Hamamoto has remained faithful to the classic floral iconography of the game, he also added a modern touch to the gameplay experience, incorporating video game concepts such as points of life (HP) that resonate with the young generations. SWIFTUI dragggesture helped him implement dynamic and very reactive effects such as tilting and brilliant cards during movement, which makes the gameplay natural and engaging. He also experiences the creation of playable hanafuda tactics on Apple Vision Pro.
The idea that an old game of centuries could one day disappear is unthinkable for Hamamoto, who had so much joy. “Hanafuda is unique in what it allows you to live the landscape and culture of Japan,” he says. “I want users of my application to feel immersed, and I want to preserve the game for future generations.”
Forest fires quickly spreading in a large part of Los Angeles earlier this year, Marina Lee, 21, received a painful telephone call. Her grandmother – a resident of the San Gabriel valley – had received an evacuation alert and had little time to decide what to do or where to go.
“As a person who grew up in Los Angeles, I have always been aware of the risks of forest and the realities that come with natural disasters,” explains Lee, a third -year student in computer science at the University of South California, who was spending a winter vacation with her parents in northern California at the time. “But with this telephone call, the emergency really hit the house. My grandmother was panicked, not knowing what to pack or how to stay prepared and informed.
Thanks to the evacuation of the Playground application, users can prepare an emergency control list of important elements to be wrapped for evacuation. Lee has joined the roller of the iPhone camera in the application so that users can download copies of important documents and add the possibility of importing emergency contacts via their iphone contact list. It has also included resources on subjects such as checking air quality levels and assembling a first aid kit.
While Lee continues to refine the evacum, it focused on the guarantee that the application is accessible to all those who might want to use it. “I would like to add a support for different languages,” explains Lee. “Returning to my grandmother, she is not also comfortable reading English, and I realized that a translation feature could really help other members of the community who are confronted with the same challenge.”
Before WWDC, Lee is anxious to promote new connections with developer colleagues, such as the types she has made to organize hackathons with her Citro Tech organization, or serving as a mentor for USC women in engineering. “Coding is much more than simple development of software,” she says. “These are really the friendships you make, the community you find and the problem of problem solving that allows you to make the difference.”
Luciana ORTIZ NOLASCO was delighted when she received a telescope for her 11th anniversary. Every night, she looked out the window of her room to explore the sky above her original state of Nuevo León, in Mexico.
But there were two problems which she quickly encountered: first, the thick layer of smog which weighed on the city strongly industrialized, obscuring the stars and their brightness, and second, a lack of comrades with geek with.
“I did not find a community until I join the astronomical society of Nuevo León”, shares Ortiz Nolasco, now 15 years old. The weekend, through the relations she has established in society, she would go to the countryside to see the stars more clearly, attending the camps and learning mentors who shared her passion. These experiences aroused its interest in making astronomy even more accessible to others.
Its Playground Breakdowncosmic application is a virtual gathering place where users can add astronomical events around the world in their calendars, win medals to accomplish “missions” and discuss with other astronomers of what they see.
Ortiz Nolasco found the ideal tool to give life to his idea with the quick programming language. “Swift is very easy to learn, and using Xcode is very intuitive,” she explains. “Most of the time, it was correcting me if I had an error. I didn’t have to spend time looking for hours and making it be a little error that I neglected.”
After attending the WWDC in June, she plans to continue to develop Breakdowncosmic, with the ultimate goal of launching it on the App Store. “I want people to have a trip to space when they connect to my application,” she said. “The universe is full of mysteries that we have not yet discovered and endless possibilities. This trip is not only for some selected people. The universe is the place where we live. It is our house, and everyone should be able to know it. ”
Having grown up in Ethiopia and later in Canada, Nahom Worku felt fired in two career instructions: to follow in the footsteps of his uncle and become a pilot, or continue an engineering diploma like his father. In the end, his fear of flying withdrew the former table profession, but he still could not decide an engineering land to specialize, until Covid-19 is struck.
“During the pandemic, I had a lot of time in my hands, so I bought a few books and discovered the design and the web coding,” explains Worku, 21. He found a community in the Black Children’s Code, a non-profit organization that helps children learn mathematics and coding, and finally became a mentor.
While helping a summer program at York University in Toronto, where he is now a fourth year student, Worku and his group have been responsible for working on a sustainable development objective of the United Nations which focuses on global insurance for quality education. For Worku, the project was revealing because it connects to its training years. “Growing up in Ethiopia, I saw the first hand how many students lacked quality education,” he explains. “In addition, many people do not have internet access or have no problems with unreliable connections.”
Its accessible playground application is designed to solve these two problems, offering accessible learning resources with or without Wi-Fi connectivity. Built using Apple automatic learning and AI tools, such as Core ML and the natural language frame, the application recommends courses based on the history of a student, creating a truly personalized experience.
“Students can take a photo of their notes, then the automatic learning model analyzes the text using Apple’s natural language framework to create flash cards,” explains Worku. “The application also has a task management system with notifications, because many students from around the world have a lot of homework and family responsibilities after school, so they often fight with time management.”
Worku hopes that accessions can unlock new possibilities for students around the world. “I hope that my application will inspire others to explore how modern technologies such as automatic learning can be used in an innovative way, especially in education, and how they can make learning more engaging, efficient and pleasant,” he said.
Apple is proud to defend the next generation of developers, creators and entrepreneurs thanks to its annual Swift Student Challenge program. Over the past five years, thousands of participants in the program around the world have created successful careers, founded businesses and created organizations focused on the democratization of technology and use it to build a better future. Learn more about Developer.apple.com/Swift-Stude-Challenge.
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