Apple To Kick Off An Online Coding Contest For Students Alongside WWDC 2020

While the COVID-19 outbreak still shows no sign of cooling down, Apple is planning to organize its annual conference WWDC (Apple Worldwide Developers Conference) and a coding contest called Swift Student Challenge via the Internet. The later is launched in order to promote and connect with the students who can’t travel to Northern California to attend this event. 

For any student developers who desire to compete in this fame-catching coding contest, they will need to use Swift Playgrounds, either on iPad or Mac, to create an interactive scene enabling experience within three minutes, then submit it via WWDC 2020 Swift Student Challenge website.

Winners of this contest will be awarded a WWDC20 jacket and pin set and will be revealed a few days before the virtual WWDC officially goes live. 

This change is actually the replacement of Apple’s annual WWDC Scholars that is given to 350 students each year, based on their Swift Playgrounds submissions. 

Talking about this initiative, Esther Hare, an Apple's spokesperson, claimed that their substitute program can still bring a sense of connection and students’ contribution to the company. 

In addition, Hare also stated that anyone at any age can enjoy the most high-quality features of the Swift Playgrounds app. The winners of the app over the past several years have developed themselves in terms of accessibility, education, mental health, and the environment very successfully. 

But this coding contest is still regarded as a hidden gem because of its untapped potentials. Although it’s named for Apple’s Swift programming language that is used to build apps for all of Apple devices, Swift Playgrounds mainly concentrates on general coding skills. That is the reason why Hare considered it as a "super-gamified" app that could bring the joy and importance of coding to everybody.