Meet the Swift Student Challenge winners

Every year, as part of its Worldwide Developers Conference, Apple issues a challenge to students around the globe: create an original app playground – an interactive scene built using the coding language Swift. This year, because the artistry, technicality, and ingenuity of the submissions rose to unprecedented levels, Apple selected 375 winners instead of the traditional 350.

The winning app playgrounds in 2023 represent more than 30 countries and regions, and cover topics as varied as healthcare, sports, entertainment and the environment. But all of the winners have one thing in common: they are using coding to share their passions with the world.

Here, five winners from Southeast Asia – Tongyu Jiang, Chotiwat Tangsathaphorn, Thao Nguyen, Jose Adolfo and Cindy Amanda Onggirawan – share the inspiration behind their projects.

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Age: 17

Country: Singapore

Winning app playground: Focusing on mental health, City Nights is a game that takes players through the journey of a stressed student and aims to help players understand the value of slowing down, taking a break and accepting help from others when things get tough.

Inspiration: The common sight of drivers crossing the traffic light several seconds before the light turned green made Jiang think about how everyone’s always rushing to be better and faster.

How she learned to code: Self-taught through online sources and the Swift Accelerator Programme in Singapore in 2020.

Advice for beginners: “Programming can be rather solitary at times, and having friends to share the enthusiasm with is invaluable. With a community of people full of shared interests, it’s a lot easier to keep the passion burning, and inspire each other along the way. For a beginner coder, making friends and connections is definitely something vital in a coding journey,” shares Jiang.

Age: 16

Country: Thailand

Winning app playground: BUB, short for Bus Route for Blind, aims to help people who are blind or have low vision navigate bus routes in Bangkok independently.

Inspiration: School for the Blind, a community in Thailand for people who are blind or have low vision, that eventually helped him test his app.

How he learned to code: A coding course and the Young iOS Developer Camp 2023.

Advice for beginners: “If you take your time and learn step by step, you will be able to code in the end because I do believe that everyone can code,” says Tangsathaphorn.

Age: 19

Country: Vietnam

Winning app playground: Welcome to Vietnam is an interactive and visually pleasing app playground that introduces Vietnamese culture through an educational experience, centred around the country’s famous cities and signature cuisines.

Inspiration: Nguyen’s experience engaging with classmates in south Florida who were not familiar with her culture.

How she learned to code: YouTube videos and online courses.

Advice for beginners: “Be patient with yourself. Sometimes, you may feel defeated because it seems like no matter how hard you try, you still cannot grasp the concept or make the code work properly. Please take a break, have something delicious and then start working on it again,” suggests Nguyen.

Age: 22

Country: Philippines

Winning app playground: LogicBoard, an interactive sandbox that allows beginners to design and simulate digital logic circuits through an intuitive and smooth experience.

Inspiration: His journey as a computer engineering student led him to discover that many digital circuit simulators today have cluttered UI/UX design, making it overwhelming for beginners to learn.

How he learned to code: The Learn to Code modules in Swift Playgrounds and self-learning through online resources, such as Hacking with Swift and Apple’s App Development with Swift e-book.

Advice for beginners: “The best way to learn is to apply all the concepts you’ve recently learned by pursuing personal programming projects. Knowing how to fix things when they break is essential to becoming a good developer and you can only experience that by taking on personal projects,” says Adolfo.

Age: 20

Country: Indonesia

Winning app playground: Kolintang Maestro simulates the experience of playing the kolintang, a wooden percussion instrument from Indonesia. Users can play folk songs in the app playground without the need to memorise complex musical notes, making the traditional instrument more accessible.

Inspiration: Her time playing kolintang alongside her school friends, throughout which she sought to experiment with the instrument’s traditional musical and numerical notes.

How she learned to code: A game called RoboMind, online courses, bootcamps and her university’s computer science course.

Advice for beginners: “Don’t be afraid to make mistakes. We can learn from our mistakes by analysing and reading the documentation. Coding is a journey that requires persistence. Stay determined and curious,” says Onggirawan.

Apple is proud to support and uplift the next generation of developers, creators and entrepreneurs through its annual WWDC student program. Over the past three decades, thousands of students have built successful careers in technology, founded startups and created organisations focused on democratising technology and using it to build a better future.

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