Apple's challenge inspires young innovators

SAN FRANCISCO－"I hope I can help inspire more people to take part in creating work that combines technology and art," says Zhang Ziyi, a Chinese college student who won Apple's 2021 Worldwide Developers Conference Swift Student Challenge.

Apple's WWDC21 was held from June 7 to 11 in an all-virtual format. Among a global community of developers, there were 350 Swift Student Challenge winners from 35 countries and regions－25 of them from the Chinese mainland.

The winners were selected as part of Apple's annual WWDC student challenge, each demonstrating their coding and problem-solving skills by submitting an original Swift playground to earn a spot.

This was Zhang's second year participating in the competition and the fourth year attending Today at Apple, a series of educational sessions launched by the company. Her project, See Your Sports, is a Swift playground that combines machine learning and augmented reality with pictures and music. She created the project from what she learned at Today at Apple.

"Some people give up on playing sports because they can't see the immediate benefits. I hope to use AR and music, as well as the cooperation between two people, to enrich sports and make them even more interesting. That's why I built this AR gym," says Zhang, a student from Sichuan International Studies University in Chongqing.

She attended a virtual meetup for a dozen Swift Student Challenge winners during the WWDC21 and shared her thoughts on the work with Apple CEO Tim Cook.

"One of my favorite parts of WWDC each year is meeting some of the outstanding Swift Student Challenge winners. I applaud you for all you've accomplished at a young age and I'm amazed at how you think through your passions and ideas so deeply," said Cook after the virtual meeting with the student winners.

Zhang says: "This makes me more determined to continue creating technology and art, stick to the things I love and pass my passion on to others."

She is also a member of a charity organization in China called Coding Girls, which is devoted to teaching girls to code with volunteer projects offering coding classes at local schools.

"Every year, we are inspired by the talent and ingenuity that we see from our Swift Student Challenge applicants," says Susan Prescott, Apple's vice-president of worldwide developer relations and enterprise and education marketing. "This year, we are incredibly proud that more young women applied and won than ever before."

In recent years, Chinese developers have thrived on the Apple app store in China and abroad. The app developer community has grown to over 4.4 million in the country, experiencing a 76 percent increase from two years ago, Apple announced ahead of WWDC21.

Xinhua