Could 7, 2026
UPDATE
AI meets accessibility in this yr’s :br(s): Swift Pupil Problem
Receiving real-time suggestions whereas giving a presentation. Escaping a flood zone in Accra. Enjoying the viola, with out the bodily instrument. Drawing on iPad with out fear of tremors. These are simply 4 of the options that this yr’s Swift Pupil Problem Distinguished Winners created with their profitable app playgrounds.
The annual Swift Pupil Problem invitations college students from throughout the globe to deliver their concepts to life by way of unique app playgrounds constructed with Apple’s easy-to-learn Swift coding language. This yr’s 350 profitable submissions characterize 37 nations and areas, and showcase a variety of applied sciences.
“The breadth of creativity we see within the Swift Pupil Problem by no means ceases to amaze us,” says Susan Prescott, Apple’s vp of Worldwide Developer Relations. “This yr’s winners discovered exceptional methods to harness the ability of Apple platforms, Swift, and AI instruments to construct app playgrounds which might be as technically spectacular as they’re significant. We’re extremely proud to assist their journey and may’t wait to see what they create subsequent.”
Fifty Distinguished Winners have been invited to attend the Worldwide Builders Convention (WWDC) at Apple Park in June, the place they’ll participate in a curated three-day expertise. All through the week, the scholars can have the chance to observe the Keynote dwell, study from Apple consultants and engineers, and take part in hands-on labs.
Lots of this yr’s winners took inspiration from their communities — and even from conversations at their kitchen tables — to engineer spectacular apps with accessibility at their core. Under, Distinguished Winners Gayatri Goundadkar, Anton Baranov, Karen-Happuch Peprah Henneh, and Yoonjae Joung delve into their app playgrounds and the real-world issues they’re aiming to unravel, demonstrating the ability of app improvement to drive lasting change.
Making Artwork Extra Accessible with Regular Arms
Gayatri Goundadkar, 20, grew up drawing and portray along with her grandmother in Pune, India. The 2 shared a ardour for Warli portray, a centuries-old artwork kind identified for its use of primary geometric shapes. However as Goundadkar’s grandmother aged, her arms began shaking and he or she was unable to partake in her every day follow. That loss stayed with Goundadkar and impressed her to construct Regular Arms, an app playground that makes use of Apple Pencil stabilization to assist people with tremors in creating artwork.
“My predominant viewers is older adults,” explains Goundadkar, a third-year laptop science pupil at Maharashtra Institute of Expertise World Peace College, the place she’s concerned in an app improvement program. “Particularly in India, know-how can really feel intimidating for that era, so I made each resolution with that in thoughts. The interface needed to really feel calm, not scientific. I didn’t need anybody to open the app and really feel misplaced or overwhelmed. I wished them to really feel prefer it was made for them.”
To ensure that the app to permit customers to attract freely, Goundadkar needed to perceive tremors and the way they have an effect on interplay with the touchscreen on iPad. Impressed partially by Apple’s accessibility options corresponding to Contact Lodging, she obtained began by studying SwiftUI ideas, utilizing Anthropic’s Claude to assist unpack classes on matters like how PencilKit handles stroke knowledge. And to characterize a person’s tremor, she constructed a instrument that analyzes uncooked movement knowledge from iPad and Apple Pencil. It captures hand actions and applies sign processing methods to determine the frequency and depth of a person’s tremor.
“When an individual attracts, my app makes use of Apple’s PencilKit and Speed up frameworks to research stroke knowledge and acknowledge tremors. It detects what’s intentional and what’s not, and removes the tremor element,” she says. “Each drawing is then displayed in a private 3D museum, as a result of I wished them to really feel like artists, not sufferers. When customers noticed the stabilization working, they felt extra assured.”
Perfecting Displays with Pitch Coach
Anton Baranov, 22, was sitting at his household’s kitchen desk in Frankfurt, Germany, when his mom, a linguistics and literature professor, made a remark that struck him.
“She stated her college students are actually gifted, however typically once they current one thing, they simply freeze. They lose their phrases. They’re slouching. They’ll’t share their concepts,” says Baranov, a pc science pupil on the College of Utilized Sciences Mittelhessen in Germany. It was in that second that pitch coach — an app Baranov describes as “an Apple Intelligence-powered wingman for Shark Tank pitches” — was born.
Baranov, who obtained into programming at 16, used Swift for the primary time final August, and in February, he constructed pitch coach. He introduced an early model to his mother’s college students and found a particular ache level: College students know the place they fall flat, however they solely understand their errors after the actual fact. “A pupil instructed me, ‘I would like to have the ability to catch myself within the act,’” Baranov remembers. “That’s precisely how the real-time suggestions and AirPods posture monitoring grew to become the core of the app.”
To information customers by way of overcoming presentation anxiousness, Baranov leveraged Apple’s Basis Fashions framework to generate personalised, context-aware suggestions and summaries after every session, alerting the person to filler phrases corresponding to “like” or “um.” He additionally used Claude Agent in Xcode 26 to translate the app into 20 languages, and consulted with mates and colleagues to assist determine filler phrases in different languages.
Baranov launched pitch coach on the App Retailer in early March, and since then, it has amassed greater than 6,000 natural downloads. Many of the app’s customers make use of it for presentation follow, however Baranov mentions some use circumstances which have made him snicker: practising rap performances and stand-up comedy routines. “Customers outline the app, so in the event that they prefer it for this objective, they use it for this objective,” he says.
Discovering Secure Flood Zone Evacuation Paths with Asuo
Karen-Happuch Peprah Henneh solely realized Swift this yr. After finishing undergraduate levels in laptop science and data know-how in her residence nation of Ghana, Henneh targeted on animation since coding alternatives had been slim. She realized Figma and HTML5 on the facet, and is now engaged on her grasp’s in interplay design on the California Faculty of the Arts.
She designed her profitable app playground, Asuo, for flood-prone communities. (Asuo means “flowing water” in Twi, a language that’s extensively spoken in Ghana.) Asuo gives protected real-time routing to people in flood zones, and it’s rooted in lived expertise — the deadly floods that hit Accra in 2015, inflicting a ripple impact of catastrophe.
“That have actually stayed with me as a result of the entire nation was in mourning,” Henneh says. “I made a decision that if I ever had an opportunity, it’s going to be the very first thing that I’d need to work on: Construct an app that may calculate rain depth and makes use of a pathfinding algorithm knowledgeable by historic flood knowledge.”
To create Asuo, Henneh needed to not solely synthesize all this knowledge, but additionally make sure that it labored for everybody. “Accessibility was a core consideration from the beginning, not an afterthought,” she says. “I consider that in a disaster, nobody must be left behind due to a incapacity or limitation.”
The app’s interactive parts have VoiceOver labels and hints, in order that customers who’re blind or have low imaginative and prescient can navigate each display, and Henneh additionally constructed a customized voice alert system utilizing AVSpeechSynthesizer, which customers can toggle on with a speaker button.
After designing Asuo’s interface in Figma, Henneh turned to Claude for assist in designing the rain simulator on her app’s launch display, together with implementing the A* pathfinding algorithm. “As a result of I’m a designer, I don’t actually dive into the very technical elements,” she shares. “I depend on AI brokers for help with these. One thing that may have taken me months to do was in a position to be executed in three or 4 days.”
By way of her nonprofit, Radiance Lady Africa, Henneh has led discussions and workshops at a number of colleges, together with the College of Training in Ghana and UniMAC, with the goal of empowering younger girls to achieve tech and the humanities. “The digital divide may be very evident,” Henneh says. “Many of those individuals didn’t have entry to computer systems rising up. There are numerous issues that know-how is ready to remedy, but when individuals from the place I’m from will not be those designing it, it’s a bit tough to catch up and study it. I design for the individuals in marginalized communities.”
Democratizing Music Training with LeViola
When Yoonjae Joung, 21, was packing for his change program at New York College, the pc science pupil couldn’t match his viola in his suitcase. However after attending a live performance on the New York Philharmonic, he started to overlook his instrument. That’s when he was impressed to create LeViola, an app playground designed to make studying and enjoying the viola extra accessible.
Although Joung has been coding for a very long time — as an adolescent in Seoul, South Korea, he made a timer to regulate electronics within the classroom, and he lately developed an AI companion gadget for the aged dwelling alone — he’s new to Swift. “After I got here up with the concept of utilizing my arms to play the instrument, and utilizing the digital camera overlay to assist customers navigate their very own bow pose, I didn’t know the place to begin,” he says. To familiarize himself with the coding language, Joung used Claude in addition to OpenAI’s Codex and Google’s Gemini. He then experimented with Create ML to coach his personal mannequin earlier than integrating it into his app utilizing Core ML.
Whereas constructing LeViola, Joung aimed to take advantage of Apple’s frameworks for on-device machine studying. “I used them to research the joint of the left hand to find out which notes are pressed,” he explains. “To distinguish between strings and a sensible enjoying expertise, I made a decision to trace the angle of the appropriate arm.”
Joung is nicely conscious of the obstacles to entry on the subject of studying an instrument. Most devices are cumbersome, and classes might be costly. “I interact with know-how as a instrument to attach individuals,” he says. “This app is barely the start. I could make this for different devices, too. Individuals with out devices can now interact in classical music. I would like extra individuals to have the chance to study an instrument and luxuriate in orchestra, and iPhone makes all of it potential.”
And although Joung is specializing in LeViola in the intervening time, he already has in thoughts one other app that fuses his passions for artwork and know-how. “I need to make digital platforms which may join individuals in the actual world,” he says.
Apple is proud to champion the subsequent era of builders, creators, and entrepreneurs by way of its annual Swift Pupil Problem program. 1000’s of contributors from all around the world have constructed profitable careers, based companies, and created organizations targeted on democratizing know-how and utilizing it to construct a greater future. Study extra at developer.apple.com/swift-student-challenge.
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