Swift Student Challenge winners inspired by family needs

Apple showcased the family-inspired coding work of three Swift Student Challenge winners Wednesday. The iPhone giant changed up its annual coding competition this year by naming 50 students Distinguished Winners among 350 top coders overall. The 50 get to attend a special event at the upcoming Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC24).

“This year’s winning Swift Student Challenge submissions once again demonstrate the breadth and depth of what is possible when talented young people use coding to make their mark on the world,” said Susan Prescott, Apple’s vice president of Worldwide Developer Relations.

“We’re also incredibly proud to welcome more outstanding student developers than ever before to Apple Park to connect with our teams and each other as they continue to build apps that will no doubt transform our future for the better,” she added.

These 3 Swift Student Challenge winners sought coding inspiration from family

Elena Galluzzo, Dezmond Blair and Jawaher Shaman are among this year’s 50 Swift Student Challenge Distinguished Winners. Like many of the 350 winning students overall, who hail from 35 countries and regions worldwide, their app playgrounds are personal. Their coding inspiration came from their families.

Apple selects winners based on their app playgrounds that stand out for innovation, creativity, social impact or inclusivity. The 50 Distinguished Winners may attend a “three-day in-person experience” at Apple Park during WWDC24.

Elena Galluzzo: Care Capsule app

Toronto, Canada resident Elena Galluzzo designed her app Care Capsule to serve as an all-in-one assistant for elderly people like her grandmother.

“My grandmother is in the late stages of Alzheimer’s disease and requires full-time care,”  Galluzzo said. “And it’s also hard on my grandfather because it can be quite lonely — even though he lives with his children and grandchildren, a lot of older people don’t. Canada has an aging population, so I think it’s really important to keep looking into ways we can help people in this field, and coding is one way I can contribute.”

Here’s what Apple said she did:

Galluzzo designed Care Capsule to be an all-in-one assistant for elderly people. She used Apple’s machine learning framework Create ML to build a chatbot that analyzes interactions with the user to deduce whether they are experiencing loneliness or depression. The app also lets users track their medications, connect with community resources, and keep a record of positive memories.

After Galluzzo graduates with a degree in business this spring, she hopes to publish Care Capsule on the App Store, potentially incorporating what she learns when she attends WWDC24 in June.

“Being able to meet other people who have the same passion as I do is very exciting,” said Galluzo, who is about to graduate from college with a business degree and hopes to publish Care Capsule on the App Store.

“I’m also really looking forward to seeing what new frameworks are coming out and how I could use them,” she added. “I think it’s very cool to be able to create something that can tap into your device’s native functionality and help solve important challenges at the same time.”

Dezmond Blair: MTB XTREME app

Dezmond Blair’s app MTB XTREME sits more in the recreational realm. But family inspired it. It puts users on a mountain bike with 360-degree view of surrounding trails.

Michigan native Blair grew up mountain biking with his little brother. He also worked on a secondhand computer that his family could not afford to connect it to the internet.

“After growing up in a trailer park, it became really important for me to make sure that I was keeping up on all my grades because my parents told me when I was young, ‘You’re definitely not ending up like we were,’” Blair said. “They spent a lot of their life trying to make sure that I wouldn’t have to struggle the same way they did, and so that’s where my inspiration and my passion comes from.”

After landing an associate’s degree in computer programming, Blair started at the Apple Developer Academy in Detroit, where he learned Apple’s coding language, Swift, and made his iPad app. He hopes to release a more immersive version for Apple Vision Pro. He’s off to a good start, having launched a company to design app prototypes he calls Easy Dez It.

And what’s his goal in all this? It comes down to his parents.

“I want to end up buying them a house one day,” says Blair. “They’ve done so much for me and my little brother, so I have to pay it forward.”

Jawaher Shaman My Child app

Jawaher Shaman, who grew up in Saudia Arabia, now studies the Apple Developer Academy in Riyadh. As a kid, she was very close to her grandfather, but he died when she was 5 years old. She soon developed a stutter that took a long time to overcome.

She intends her winning app playground, My Child, to help others with speech conditions.

“My father never made me feel different, and I hope my app will do the same for any child or young person who suffers from stuttering,” she said. “I don’t want them to ever feel like stuttering is a hurdle they can’t overcome.”

Here’s what the app does:

My Child tells Shaman’s story through the eyes of a child who stutters, and features characters inspired by her father and grandfather. The app guides users through exercises that help slow down their breathing and prepare them for real-life experiences like reading a story in class. Shaman used AVFAudio to add sounds that mimic the way her father would break sentences into small, more manageable parts.

After graduation, Shaman will work as a programmer in Saudi Arabia, and she also wants to publish My Child on the App Store and continue creating apps that assist others.

“I hope to use technology to help children who are neurodivergent because I know what it’s like to feel different,” said Shaman, who intends to become a programmer and hopes to publish My Child on the App Store.

“Coding for me opened up a world of possibilities, and it brings me one step closer to achieving my goals, which are to help people and create a lasting impact,” she added.

Last year’s Swift Student Challenge winners did inspiring work, too.

Source: Apple