Every year, Apple holds Swift Student Challenge before its Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) in which young coders from around the world submit their apps build through the Swift Playgrounds app on topics of their choice.
The winners of WWDC 2022 Swift Student Challenge are 17-year-old Jones Mays II from Houston, Texas, 16-year-old Angelina Tsuboi from Redondo Beach, California, and 19-year-old Josh Tint from Tucson, Arizona. All three young coders have created apps to help their communities.
Swift Student Challenge winner created apps for gardeners, immigrants, and people struggling with gender identity
- Inspired by his grandfather’s love and passion for gardening, Jones Mays II created an app called Ivy for gardeners to identify and remove plants like kudzu. He believes that his late grandfather would have commended him on his “good job”.
“My grandfather had a garden that he loved, and he grew so much food that he just allowed people from the community to come in and grab what they needed,” said Mays, who is about to start his senior year of high school in Houston, Texas. “Even though he couldn’t walk at the end of his life, he used to point and that’s where I’d put down the seeds for him. But we always had to try to get rid of the kudzu vine — it was an ongoing fight.”
- Angelina Tsuboi launched the Lilac app on the App Store which is designed to provide access to useful information like housing, childcare, and others to immigrants with language problems in the United States. She was driven by her mother’s personal struggle to develop an innovative solution.
“My mom is a single mother and she’s from Japan,” said Tsuboi. “When she came here, she had problems with the language, so I made an app where you can find resources such as childcare or housing or grant opportunities, and translators in the community to help you connect with them.”
- For people struggling with their gender identity, Josh Tint build a linguistic app that allows them to insert different pronouns in the sample text to see which one matches their identity.
“I’ve questioned my gender identity and so I know there aren’t many resources out there to help with that,” said Tint. “So I wanted to try to build a tool that I thought was more applicable to my experience and could help others, too. I wanted my app to help tell a story.”
The three Swift Student Challenge winners are among over 350 students from 40 countries who were selected as 2022 winners. Earlier, the winners shared their prizes which included free AirPods Pro as a bonus this year.
