What Is Apple’s Swift Student Challenge? Know All the Details

Apple's Swift Student Challenge is a global competition for students to showcase their creativity and coding skills by creating an app playground using the Swift programming language.The Swift Student Challenge is a great way for students to learn about Swift, develop their coding skills, and create innovative apps that make a difference. It is also a chance for students to connect with other developers from around the world and share their passion for coding.

For 2024, the applications for the event will open up in February 2024 for three weeks. 

Apple’s Swift Student Challenge blog mentioned: “Applications will open in February 2024 for three weeks. New for the 2024 Challenge, out of 350 winners, we’ll recognize 50 Distinguished Winners for their outstanding submissions and invite them to Apple in Cupertino for an extraordinary experience.” 

“All Challenge winners will receive one year of membership in the Apple Developer Program, a complimentary voucher to take an App Development with Swift certification exam, and a special gift from Apple,” it adds.

What Is the Eligibility Criteria for Swift Student Challenge? 

The eligibility criteria for the Swift Student Challenge are as follows: 

• Be 13 years of age or older.
• Be registered as an Apple developer.
• Fulfill one of the following requirements:
• Be enrolled in an accredited academic institution.
• Be enrolled in a STEM organization's educational curriculum.
• Be enrolled in an Apple Developer Academy.
• Have graduated from high school within the past 6 months and are awaiting acceptance or have received acceptance to an accredited academic institution.

What are the Requirements for Building App Playground? 

Apple has mentioned the following criteria for building App Playground: 

• “Your submission must be an app playground (.swiftpm) in a ZIP file.

• Your creation should not rely on a network connection and any resources used in your app playground should be included locally in the ZIP file. Submissions will be judged offline.

• Your ZIP file can be up to 25 MB.

• Your submission must be created by you as an individual or a template modified by you as an individual. Group work will not be considered. You may include third-party open source licensed code and/or public domain images and sounds, with credit and an explanation of why it was used.

• Your app playground must be built with and run on Swift Playgrounds 4.4 or later (requires iPadOS 16 or macOS 13.5) or Xcode 15 on macOS 13.5 or later. You may incorporate the use of Apple Pencil.

• All content should be in English.”