What you need to know
- Apple has shared four more stories of developers.
- All four developers won this year's Swift Student Challenge.
- 350 developers across 60 countries have won this year's challenge.
As part of WWDC, Apple is highlighting the stories of its Swift Student Challenge winners. Today, the company has published a blog post on its Developer site to showcase for student developers.
The first developer the company is highlighting is Henrique Conte, a developer from Brazil that built a game right into the Mac's Touch Bar.
"Within the playground, players have to help Eleanor, a young developer, escape from a cave. The twist: The "cave" level is entirely located within the Touch Bar. "I chose to use unusual frameworks to show that it is possible to do amazing things with them," Conte said. "I feel that (the Touch Bar) has so much potential yet to be discovered, and I wanted to demonstrate some of its capabilities."
The second developer that Apple has highlighted is Louise Pieri, a 21-year-old who built a game called 'Meep'. The game pits players as a "blue transgender monster" who must navigate parallel universes.
"Meep is a game with two levels: the first is a level where everything is reversed and upside-down and the second is where everything is normal," says Pieri. "The story is about a little blue transgender monster who wants to reach the final level and turn pink... it's a beautiful metaphor for what happens in the life of a trans person."
The next developer highlighted is Devin Green, and 18-year-old who built an artificial intelligence chatbot to help those stuck in isolation during the pandemic.
"With everything that is going on in the world right now, I thought people stuck in isolation might find it beneficial to their mental health to talk to a capable AI companion," he said. Green, who will attend Stanford this fall for computer science and engineering, took about a week to build his playground — most of that time dedicated to refining machine learning models that created Stanny's 'intelligence.'"
The last developer highlighted is Renata Pôrto, a 21-year-old from Brazil who, after two unsuccessful Swift playground submissions in previous years, won the challenge this year with her visual art app.
"I was not satisfied with my own decision to continue with a 'safe' idea," she told us. Instead, she began considering concepts she'd wanted to learn about but hadn't yet explored — including generative art. "One of the things I always thought was fantastic about programming is the possibility of transforming lines of code into visual and interactive experiences," she said. Just six days later, she emerged with Polar Patterns, a Swift playground that helps people learn more about mathematical roses and generate their own visual art."
You can learn more about each developer and the apps they built on the Developer website.
