KUALA LUMPUR, Feb 10 — It’s that time of year again for student developers to get excited about their coding projects; the Apple Swift Student Challenge is now taking entries until February 28.

What’s this?

If you don’t already know what it is, the Swift Student Challenge is a way for student coders to send in their own little projects for a chance to be among the 350 winners, selected for projects that demonstrate “innovation, creativity, social impact, or inclusivity.”

Of the 350 selected, another 50 will be declared Distinguished Winners who will get to visit Apple in Cupertino for three days.

What needs doing?

There are certain eligibility requirements that need to be met.

You need to meet the minimum age depending on your country or region. In Malaysia it’s 16 years.

Participants also need to meet one of the following criteria:

• Be enrolled in, or have graduated within the last 90 days from, an accredited academic institution or official homeschool equivalent, or an Apple Developer Academy;
• Be enrolled in a STEM organisation’s educational curriculum; or
• Have graduated from high school or equivalent within the past 6 months and be awaiting acceptance or have received acceptance to an accredited academic institution.

While you can win the Swift Student Challenge up to three times, you only get to be a Distinguished Winner once.

So, I need to build an app?

Not a full-on app but an app “playground” created within Apple’s free Swift Playground 4.6 or Xcode 26 that can be experienced within three minutes.

The app playground must not need a network connection and all assets and resources must be included with it in a single ZIP file (the format needs to be in.swiftpm).

All content also needs to be in English.

Apple’s advice? “Be creative.”

Fortunately past winners were more verbose in their recommendations.

Singapore’s Jatin Rakesh a Distinguished Winner had this to share: “Start early like maybe 1-2 months depending on your skill when applications open.

“Be consistent! Try to think of ways that you can engage the judges or impress them with a good storyline and some creative elements which you prefer to add and start designing your app on softwares like Figma.

“Try to think of ways that you can link your app to an emotion that you want the users to feel. Your write up is also as important as your actual app and take some time doing your write up.”

Zerul Wang a Challenge winner from Singapore says to start with what excites you.

“Maybe that’s building a game, automating some tasks, or making your own portfolio website. Try everything, from games to hardware to AI to art to cybersecurity!” 

So what else do I need to know?

You can get more information on the challenge here. 

So young, aspiring coders, what are you waiting for?