Apple’s app-building challenge shined the spotlight on Canada’s next generation of tech leaders

As the last weeks of summer approach (tear), we thought we’d offer a little back-to-school inspiration for the students, courtesy of Apple. Today’s young Canadian students are leading the way on the technology front, making life easier for the rest of the population in the process. They’re creating apps that assist in the day-to-day life of aging baby boomers, help traffic woos with clever pathfinding algorithms, and empower people to create music. These are just some examples of forward-thinking apps that have come from young creative Canadian minds as of late. 

Each year, as a part of the Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) Apple issues a challenge to students across the globe: create an original app playground using the Swift coding language. Swift is a powerful and intuitive programming language for all Apple platforms that allows for building apps for iOS, Mac, Apple TV, and Apple Watch.

Winners are selected from across the world – more than 30 countries and regions – and are recognized by Apple for their artistry and ingenuity. And fourteen of the 375 winning students just happen to be from Canada. 

Elena Galluzzo – Ajax/Waterloo, ON

Elena is a 22-year-old University of Laurier student from Ajax, Ontario who only began coding about a year ago after learning more about it at a co-op program. Mixing her worlds of marketing and coding, she began to self-teach herself through YouTube videos, jumping into Xcode and Swift Playgrounds. Her app, CareCapsule, is an all-in-one elder care app designed to allow older generations to best live their life. Her goal is to make it easier on those with memory loss, providing an avenue to address loneliness along with supporting the caretakers. 

Essentially, CareCapsule allows users to keep track of their medication schedule and medications they have taken, and monitors tasks and appointments that they have through data persistence on the users’ device using SwiftData framework. Care Capsule also attempts to provide companionship through a logic and machine learning-based chatbot assistant that can read and track their mental health through sentiment analysis, which was achieved through training a dataset. 

Galluzzo says the inspiration behind the app came from living with her grandparents for her entire life. “When I was a child, my grandma was happy and healthy, but then she was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and regressed drastically throughout the years, which was a huge toll on her, my grandfather, and the rest of the family,” says Galluzzo. “My grandmother is unable to communicate and my family became her caregivers along with personal support workers. With my parents being away for work, and my sister and I away for school, my grandfather could easily get lonely.”

Galluzzo acknowledges that this sense of loneliness is worse for those who don’t live with their children or grandchildren. “Many elderly don’t have many people in their immediate circle to communicate with frequently, which could lead to feelings of loneliness and depression,” says Galluzzo. “Therefore, I wanted CareCapsule to provide both assistance and support, for not only keeping track of medication and tasks but also help with supporting the mental health of seniors through methods of keeping track of positive memories and providing resources catered to older adults to those who show signs of poor mental health. And with Canada’s aging population, apps or solutions like these are so relevant and should be focused on.”

These are just the initial features; Galluzzo has plans to evolve the app. 

“My goals to further improve the app, especially with the assistant portion, and incorporate more artificial intelligence on top of the sentiment analysis that can offer more specific responses to the user and rely less on logic,” says Galluzzo. “I also want to provide more options to how a user can store their medication, tasks and memories, and also provide not only text to speech but speech to text and overall improve accessibility.  These were left out of the playground since the contest required the app to function offline, but these additions can be achieved with internet connection, allowing me to incorporate Speech Recognition API and a large language model API.”

Shaurya Gupta, Hamilton, ON

Shaurya Gupta is a 13-year-old student from Hamilton, ON with a passion for app development. After immigrating from India, Gupta found that there wasn’t that much homework at his new school and ended up with a lot of spare time. With this free time, he decided to learn coding in hopes of developing apps. His app, Fizzix, aims to make learning about Newton’s laws of physics interesting and hands-on for students. The app is a playground, where the user can experience the laws of physics and how objects react. His goal as an app developer is to help people learn in their day-to-day life, eventually creating something to help save time and build routines for learning.

“I was studying physics after school in my own time when I came across the laws of motion by Isaac Newton,” says Gupta. “This was interesting to me, since these laws are actually what everything in our universe abides by. When I was learning about this topic, it seemed more practical than theoretical since we could test them out. That is when I thought of creating an app that could simulate these laws so that people all around the world can see how important it is. With the Swift Student Challenge around the corner, I knew this would be the perfect Swift Playground for my submission.”

Gupta acknowledges that the creation of the app didn’t come without its challenges. “Just like any other project, this one also had bugs and challenges along the way,” says Gupta. “For example, when I was making the actual simulations, I had to first go deeper into SpriteKit (a Swift framework by Apple that helps you create 2D games), to make it as practical as possible. This wasn’t the only challenge though. I faced countless bugs and errors, which helped me improve my skills even further. However, I wouldn’t say that these roadblocks are bad things since with every bug you fix you become a better coder.”

At the end of the day, the app simplifies learning about a very complex topic. “My Swift Playground Fizzix is an app in which anyone can click on a law of motion out of the three and they can read through what the law of motion states, after which they can play around with the simulation which is specifically made for that law,” says  Gupta, “After you have studied all three laws you can do a short quiz to test your knowledge. This playground is offline so you do not need the internet to use it.”

Jared Trueco – Edmonton, AB

Jared Trueco is a 22-year-old studying computer engineering at the University of Alberta. After switching from civil engineering to computer engineering, Jared wanted to learn how to code and build apps. His app, Rhythm, is a drum machine app that allows users to record noises to a given beat or tempo for sound mixing and music creation. Inspired by his love of hip-hop, Trueco wanted to make a full drum machine accessible to any user, building out the next generation of hip-hop producers.

As a virtual drum machine, the app allows users to record and loop their drum beats in real-time. Users can create, play, and visualize their beats on an interactive grid. The app’s interface is designed to be user-friendly and also features a live tutorial, making it easy for anyone to dive into music production, whether they’re beginners or experienced producers, says Trueco. By tapping on different parts of the 2×4 drum pad, users can experiment with different rhythms and sounds, creating unique drum patterns on the fly.

“Creating this drum machine app was immensely rewarding, as it merged my deep interest in music with my proficiency in programming,” says Trueco. “I have always been fascinated by iconic music production tools like the AKAI MPC, which are known for their innovative design and expressive capabilities. My biggest inspiration came from one of my favourite music producers, J-Dilla (James Dewitt Yancey), who significantly influenced the hip-hop sound in the late 1990s to early 2000s primarily using a simple drum machine/music sampler. I aimed to emulate the essence of such hardware in a virtual format, making it more approachable for everyone.” 

The app empowers users by offering interactive tutorials that teach the basics of music theory. These lessons cover essential concepts like notes, beats, and rhythm, helping users build a strong foundation. With this knowledge, users can experiment and create their own looped beats, fostering creativity and a deeper understanding of musical rhythm and production.

“The next steps for the app involve expanding its capabilities into a fully-fledged sampler, allowing users to input their own sounds through file uploads or the microphone and modify these audio samples as they wish,” says Trueco. “Additionally, I plan to deploy the app to the App Store soon, aiming to first gather feedback from potential users to refine and enhance the app’s features and functionality.” 

Xavier Normant – Montreal, QC
Xavier Normant is a 24-year-old Concordia University student whose coding journey started when he was just 11-years-old. Wanting to create flash games, he began coding, which developed into small website building and, after taking a short break, is back invested in learning app development. 

His app, Route, aims to teach pathfinding algorithms to those who don’t know what pathfinding is. This isn’t Xavier’s first app, however, when his girlfriend started her interior design degree, she was not used to the calculations of feet and inches, so to help her out he created a conversion calculator. 

“I had just learned about pathfinding algorithms in class, which sparked my interest,” says Normant. “I wanted to implement them in a project, and I figured that the Swift Student Challenge was the perfect opportunity for that.”

“Users start by choosing from three distinct pathfinding algorithms, each accompanied by a concise description outlining the algorithm’s approach, strengths, and weaknesses,” says Normant. “By interacting with a grid, users can create different maps by placing obstacles and moving the start and target blocks to various locations. They can also use the generative maze feature to challenge the pathfinding algorithm with more complex mazes. Finally, users can watch a real-time solving animation of the algorithm as it attempts to find a path.”

Like most app creators, Normant faced a few roadblocks (no pun intended) along the way. “The biggest challenge was finding a way to slow down the execution of the algorithms to allow users to watch them attempt to find a path in real time,” he says. “I had to learn a lot about Swift Concurrency in order to overcome this.”

“I wanted to make the learning experience as fun as possible,” says Trueco. “I designed the app to feel like a toy that users can play with, as I believe this is generally a great way to learn about how something works. This aspect is the essence of the learning experience I aimed to create.”