Ever since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, businesses, events and festivals have all taken a hit. It has led to the rise of different types of events taking the online route by having them hosted on virtual platforms–and the annual Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) is set to do the same this year.
The event will be taking place from June 22nd to 26th and includes over 100 engineering sessions and the Apple Design Awards. A significant part of the WWDC20 was the Swift Student Challenge, which was an opportunity for student developers to showcase their coding passion and skills. Each participant was asked to create their own Swift playground and there were submissions from 41 different countries!
Even more exciting is the fact that 11 of the 350 global winners are Canadian high school and university students. With winning submissions from Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal and Waterloo, it is truly a moment of Canadian pride.
Below featured are the WWDC20 Swift Student Challenge Winners from Canada:
Pranav Karthik, 14, Vancouver
This talented coder caught the attention Apple CEO Tim Cook at last year’s WWDC. Cook praised Pranav’s efforts on Twitter for teaching others how to code using Swift programming language through videos. In May 2020, he launched a non-profit in India called Manavata’s iOS app. It was created to help the less fortunate create daily schedules, meals and exercise through Yoga.
Duraid Abdul, 20, Vancouver (Surrey)
Duraid is a mechanical engineering and computer science student at University of Alberta. He is currently working on building a calendar app that will be user-friendly based on fluid gestures on iPhone or iPad.
Tate Liang, 18, Vancouver (Coquitlam)
Tate will be graduating from Port Moody Secondary School this month and is currently working on two games which he hopes to release this summer.