From left to right: Dezmond Blair, Elena Galluzzo, and Jawaher Shaman are three of this year’s Swift Student Challenge winners.
Credit: Apple
Every year, Apple, in a bid to encourage software coding among youngsters, hosts the Swift Student Challenge. Winning contestants get the opportunity to meet experts, get mentorship, and tools to turn their application idea into a reality.
With just a month left before the annual World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC) 2024 event, the company has announced 350 winning candidates from 35 regions worldwide.
Among them, 50 contestants have been recognised as distinguished winners for their standout app submissions in terms of innovation, creativity, social impact, or inclusivity. These students have been invited to a three-day in-person experience at Apple Park.
“This year’s winning Swift Student Challenge submissions once again demonstrate the breadth and depth of what is possible when talented young people use coding to make their mark on the world. We’re also incredibly proud to welcome more outstanding student developers than ever before to Apple Park to connect with our teams and each other as they continue to build apps that will no doubt transform our future for the better,” said Susan Prescott, Apple’s vice president of Worldwide Developer Relations.
Elena Galluzzo (Canada), Dezmond Blair (US) and Jawaher Shaman (Saudi Arabia) are Swift Student Challenge's top three distinguished winners.
Galluzzo, who is pursuing a degree at Wilfrid Laurier University, Ontario has developed an inspiring prototype app 'Care Capsule', an all-in-one assistant for elderly people.
Her grandmother is in the late stages of Alzheimer’s disease and requires full-time care. And, though they live with all family members, the grandfather still feels lonely at times. Moved by their plight, Galluzzo developed Care Capsule. She used Apple’s machine learning framework Create ML to build a chatbot. It is capable of analysing interactions with the users to infer whether they are experiencing loneliness or depression, The app will help them connect with like-minded people, offer medication reminder and also keeps a record of good memories in the form of old photos and videos to develop positive thoughts about life.
“Being able to meet other people (at WWDC 2024) who have the same passion as I do is very exciting. I’m also really looking forward to seeing what new frameworks are coming out and how I could use them. I think it’s very cool to be able to create something that can tap into your device’s native functionality and help solve important challenges at the same time,” Galluzzo said.
After completing her studies at university, Galluzzo hopes to complete the app development and release it on the Apple App Store by next year’s WWDC.
Dezmond Blair, 22, comes from a humble background in Canton, Michigan. He grew up in a trailer park and his family could only afford secondhand computer to support Blair follow his passion for software coding.
Besides computers, Blair is an outdoor junkie with a craze for mountain biking. He has developed an award-winning iPad app called MTB XTREME. It offers users a 360-degree view of the adventurous trails from a normal video camera fitted to the handlebars of a mountain bike. He has plans to roll out an even more immersive version of Apple Vision Pro.
“After growing up in a trailer park, it became really important for me to make sure that I was keeping up on all my grades because my parents told me when I was young, ‘You’re not ending up like we were. They spent a lot of their life trying to make sure that I wouldn’t have to struggle the same way they did, and so that’s where my inspiration and my passion comes from. I want to end up buying them a house one day. They’ve done so much for me and my little brother, so I have to pay it forward,” said Dezmond Blair.
Jawaher Shaman from Saudi Arabia has developed an app prototype, My Child. It has heart touching story behind the app development. When Shaman was five years old, her grandfather passed away. She was too attached to her grandpa and the irreplaced loss had a huge impact on her mental health. She developed stutter and that became debilitating.
Thankfully, with the help of her father, Shaman managed to overcome it and she no longer stutters.
Shaman, now 27, in a bid to help children with similar conditions developed ‘My Child’. It guides users through the routine of exercises that help slow down their breathing and prepare them for real-life experiences like reading a story confidently in class. Shaman used the AVFAudio kit to add sounds that mimic the way her father would break sentences into small, more manageable parts.
After graduating from college, Shaman plans to complete the ‘My Child’ app and release it on the Apple App Store soon.
“I hope to use technology to help children who are neurodivergent because I know what it’s like to feel different. coding for me opened up a world of possibilities, and it brings me one step closer to achieving my goals, which are to help people and create a lasting impact,” said Jawaher Shaman.
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