Ten years later: why you should try the Swift Student Challenge

10 min readJan 31, 2024

WWDC 2017, San Jose McEnery Convention Center, in line for the keynote. Credits: Apple

Swift Student Challenge applications opened on February 5, 2024. But first, what’s the Swift Student Challenge, why you should participate and what’s at stake?

As a four time WWDC Scholar, I will tell you more in detail in this article.

What’s the Swift Student Challenge

The Swift Student Challenge is a coding challenge ideated by Apple in 2020, following the previous WWDC Student Scholarships. The target of the challenge is to showcase the best Swift talents worldwide and reward them in the best way. Participants are requested to submit a playground written in Swift Playgrounds (iPadOS or macOS), or Xcode.

What should you put on the Playground? Whatever you create that showcase your coding skills, your creativity and your potential. It could be a playground that helps other student to learn maths, or that illustrates the rules of basketball in a fun and interactive way. You can go as far as you want, but don’t worry: even the simplest playgrounds have a chance to be rewarded, when there is a great idea behind them.

If you are starting from scratch — either with learning Swift or by finding the good idea — there are tons of resources and previous work on the web that might help you. Keep reading: you’ll find them further down the road.

A bit of history…

WWDC 2014 Student Orientation at Apple Store Stockton Street, San Francisco. Credits: Apple

Swift Student Challenge is the successor of the WWDC Student Scholarship.

Before 2020, Apple rewarded the most talented Swift students from around the world with a free ticket to attend WWDC (worth $1,600!), Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference, which takes place every year the first week of June in San Jose (previously in San Francisco).

The “standard” ticket included access to the entire conference (sessions and labs) spanning over five days, including the Keynote, the Platforms State of the Union and the Apple Design Awards on Monday. A concert, the Bash, was held on Thursday, featuring top bands like Bastille, Vampire Weekend, Walk the Moon, Good Charlotte, Panic! At The Disco, Fall Out Boy, and others. I even saw The Weeknd sing live on stage for the announcement of Apple Music in 2015 . And you would receive the traditional WWDC jacket.

In addition, students were treated like kings during the conference by the staff, and you were able to get additional merch (dedicated pins, a backpack, a notes book, an Apple TV, AirPods…). As students, you were invited to the Orientation on Sunday, which took place in different spots — from the old Apple Store on Stockton Street to the Steve Jobs Theater at Apple Park 😱
This was the best opportunity to meet some key personalities from Apple management, including Tim Cook, Craig Federighi, and Lisa Jackson.

WWDC merch from 2018: a “standard” set of pins, the badge, a pin based on your nationality, a scholar pin and the typical jacket from Levi’s.

WWDC Scholarships started in 2011 with 150 seats, then increased to 250, and finally 350. I had the opportunity to receive a Scholarship in 2014 (yes, 10 years ago 🧓🏻), 2015, 2017 and 2018. And I can clearly say that my life, and the way I look at the job I am doing since the last 12 years, has changed dramatically since then.

But, how did it become a Swift Student Challenge? What happened in the meantime?

Well, the pandemic.

In 2020, WWDC switched from being a completely in-person conference, to become a fully remote, prerecorded experience. So the Swift Student Challenge had to adapt accordingly.

The process was basically the same as before — you had to write a Playground in a short timeframe, send it to Apple and cross your fingers — but the prizes were different: AirPods Pro, a hoodie and some pins.

But since 2022 the conference came back in a hybrid form, with a Special Event at Apple Park on Monday, and some Swift Student Challenge participants were able to participate again. Most of the in-person experience of WWDC is gone, and that’s a bit sad, but fortunately there is still something going on and, I want to emphasize, now it takes place *inside Apple Park*, around Cafè Macs.

Why is it important?

It’s a great — I mean, GREAT — opportunity for you as a student.

It’s a good way to learn Swift if you have never tried it before, or to master your skills in new areas if you are already familiar with the language and frameworks.

Adding to that, it’s a good way to elevate your contribution to a new, global-scale level. You can share and discuss your idea with fellow students, in a vibrant worldwide community of Scholarship and Student Challenge recipients. You could then meet them in your city or around the world and establish new friendships. That’s how some long lasting friendships born for me, with some friends living in my same region and others across the ocean(s).

And, if you’re lucky enough to reach Cupertino, that will be the real big leap. Meet fellows students, software engineers, designers from all corners of the globe and spend some days around Apple Park and in the Bay Area, where everything started decades ago.

What’s new this year?

This year, submissions start way earlier — whereas in previous years it was happening around April and May. This is to give students more time to craft and perfect their playgrounds.

Supporting material have been online since last November on the Apple Developer website.

IMPORTANT: Submissions opened on February 5 and will stay open until Sunday, February 25, 2024 at 11:59 pm PST. If you are wondering what’s the deadline in your local timezone, take a look here.

Eligibility

For the complete and official list, visit the Eligibility page. Please also read the full Terms and Conditions before submitting.

To participate in the Swift Student Challenge, you must meet certain requirements:

be 13+ years old in the US, 16+ years old in the EU, or the equivalent minimum age in your country;
be registered for free as an Apple Developer (you just need an Apple ID), or be a member of an Apple Developer Program (e.g. from a company or your school);
be enrolled in one of the following: an academic institution (any school, university, etc., even non-STEM-related), an official homeschool equivalent, a STEM organization, an Apple Developer Academy, or have graduated within the past 6 months and be awaiting acceptance/have received acceptance in another academic institution;
in case you have already won a Swift Student Challenge, you must have been awarded less than four times in the past.

Requirements for your playground

you should prepare a playground in Xcode 15 (on macOS 13.5 or later) or Swift Playgrounds 4.4 (on iPadOS 16 or macOS 13.5) that can be experienced within three minutes. You can incorporate the use of Apple Pencil.
the final file should be an app playground (.swiftpm), inside a ZIP file that can be up to 25 MB in size.
the playground should not depend on a network connection (it should work offline). Any resource, like images, music and videos, should be included locally in the ZIP file.
the playground must be created by you as an individual, or starting from a template and modified by you.
you may include third-party open source code and/or public domain media, with credits and explanation of why they were used.
all contents must be in English.

The application process, step by step

You can find the application form here. Here’s a brief overview of the different parts of the form:

Your Information: put here your personal details, including your personal phone number, age, gender, and ethnicity.
Student Status: pick one of the available options from the list. If you’re enrolled to a school or university, just pick the first option, otherwise select the one that fits your case better. You shall also declare that you are not working fulltime.
App Playground: here you will pick some files from your Mac. In “Playground & Assets”, pick the final .zip file for your submission. For each “Screenshot” picker, choose the three best screenshots that depict your playground. Answer the questions about how the judges should run the Playground (either macOS or iPadOS), declare if you used open source software, and whether you used any third-party content that you don’t have ownership, for example images or music from a third-party. Finally, write a short recap of no more than 200 words about the features and technologies that you used in the app, for example some features of Swift, SwiftUI, or any Apple SDK that you want to showcase.
Beyond the Swift Student Challenge: this section is optional. If you’ve used your coding skills to support your community (e.g. you took part in hackathons, or you’ve organised a school event, etc.), tell a bit more about that to Apple.
Apps on the App Store: this section is optional. If you already have some apps on the App Store, use this section to showcase them and tell a bit more about. This won’t influence the judging process.
Comments: this section is optional. If you have final remarks to communicate to the judges, this is the best place to do so.

Finally, tick the T&C checkbox, hit “Submit” and cross your fingers! Good luck!

A tip from my side: don’t wait ‘til the last minute to send your application. Bad luck might always be around the corner: a crappy internet connection, an unexpected and urgent errand, an issue with your Playground. Prepare your material beforehand and submit your Playground *at least* 6–8 hours before the deadline, which is February 25, 2024 at 11:59 p.m. *PST*.

Prizes

Your status will be notified at the email address of your Apple ID by mid-April. 350 students will be selected as winners of the Swift Student Challenge, and they will receive one year of membership in the Apple Developer Program, a complimentary App Development with Swift certification exam, and “a special gift from Apple”.

50 out of these 350 winners will be rewarded as “Distinguished Winners”, and they will be able to spend three days at Apple in Cupertino to gain insights from Apple experts and engineers, connect with fellow winners, and enjoy unforgettable experiences; travel and lodging are paid by Apple.

My tips and tricks

Have a brainstorming session. Even if you already have an idea in mind, do a quick brainstorming and list down all the ideas that might come up and evaluate whether they are feasible or not, considering your current skillset, your current knowledge of Swift, and the remaining timeframe.

Get inspired from previous playgrounds. Struggling with finding an idea? You can either start from one of the templates provided by Apple, or head to WWDCScholars or GitHub and see what other students have done in previous years.

Make your playground truly yours. Customize it, create your own style, highlight your favourite trends, talk about what you like and why you made your playground. You usually have to answer some questions while delivering the playground, so make sure to talk about that. Make it truly yours.

A Playground is like a book: write your own. Comments on the playground will become part of your submissions, and here you can both explain how your playground work and allow the judges to manipulate your code, e.g. to select a different level of difficulty or change some parameters. Take advantage of this.

Push your limits. If you are already familiar with Swift, use this opportunity as an adventure. Discover unchartered frameworks and try to make the best out of them. For example, I wasn’t that kind of guy writing videogames — well, I don’t even play videogames 😅 — but in 2017 and 2018 I pushed myself with SpriteKit, SceneKit and ARKit, and managed to prepare a playground and get a Scholarship.

Play with Apple’s core values. This is not set in stone, but you might get extra points if you strike the chords of your judges. That means showcasing what you have in common with Apple: perhaps you love to perfect the UI and design clean user interfaces, or you’re committed to environmental issues, or you want to show how a playground might improve the lives of your peers and make a difference in the world. Show it to your judges. The stage is yours.

Test that everything works fine and follow the requirements. You don’t want to deliver a buggy implementation, right? Before submitting your playground, make sure to double- or triple-check it, including testing any possible edge case or unexpected situations.

It’s a race. Enjoy the journey. In the past we had little time to submit our playgrounds. Now you have a bit more time, but anyway: this is a race. Made up by long hours of coding, satisfactions, disappointments, bugs, and coffee — if you drink it. You will probably recall it in the future. Enjoy these days. My suggestion: pick a soundtrack for your coding time.