What you need to know
- Apple has announced there are 350 Swift Student Challenge Winners.
- The winners come from a total of 41 different countries.
- Apple has highlighted some of the winners in a Newsroom post.
Apple today announced that there are no fewer than 350 WWDC20 Swift Student Challenge winners coming from as many as 41 different countries. Apple also shared some of those winners and their stories in a new Newsroom post.
Apple highlighted three teenagers who created some impressive apps for the challenge, including one that is designed to make it easier for people who have been sexually assaulted to seek help when they need it.
For Sofia Ongele, 19, who just finished her sophomore year at New York's Fordham University, her focus for change lies at the intersection of tech and social justice. ReDawn, her first iOS app, is a powerful example. After one of her college friends was sexually assaulted during her freshman year, Ongele created ReDawn to help survivors access resources in a safe, easy, and sensitive way.
Palash Taneja, 19, contracted dengue fever four years ago and wanted to create an app that would be able to predict the spread of similar diseases. So he did.
He went on to create a web-based tool that uses machine learning to predict how mosquito-borne diseases like dengue fever would spread. And for his Swift Student Challenge submission this year, created against the backdrop of COVID-19, Taneja designed a Swift playground that teaches coding while simulating how a pandemic moves through a population, showing how precautions such as social distancing and masks can help slow infection rates. He created it to help educate young people, after he saw others not taking warnings seriously.
Devin Green, 18, was struggling to get up in the morning while learning from home. So he created an app that ensured he would – just to shut off the world's most annoying alarm.
The 18-year-old, who will start his freshman year at Stanford in the fall, was having trouble waking up in the mornings, so he designed a program using a pressure mat under his bed. If weight is still on the mat after he's supposed to be up, an alarm goes off and won't stop until he uses his phone to scan a QR code.
You can find out all about these apps in Apple's Newsroom post and there will be tons of WWDC content here on iMore early next week, too.
