Apple WWDC 2023: 20-Year-Old Indian Dev Wins Apple Swift Student Challenge – All Details

Apple has announced this year’s WWDC 2023 Swift Student Challenge winners on Tuesday, and one of them is a 20-year-old girl from India who has developed an app playground to help with strengthening their eye muscles.

The Swift Student Challenge is part of the Apple WWDC every year which challenges budding students from across the globe to create a new app playground using its Swift coding language. Along with Asmi Jain, a 20-year-old student from India, the other winners are 21-year-old Yemi Agesin from the United States and 25-year-old Marta Michelle Caliendo.

As mentioned by Apple in its post, “Caliendo’s winning app playground is a memory game featuring anatomically correct pictures of dinosaur fossils that she drew in Procreate on iPad, made all the more impressive because she only learned Swift in September.” Similarly, Agesin’s winning app playground is a first-person baseball game that alludes to two of his passions: sports and filmmaking,” the post adds.

But the most impressive of the lot comes from Indore-based Jain who is a student at the Medi-Caps University. The idea behind her app playground was based on her friend’s uncle who went through a brain surgery which left him with eye misalignment and facial paralysis. “It was important for me to create an app playground that could positively impact the lives of people like him,” says Jain

Jain then decided to base her app playground idea on the ability to track a user’s eye movement which is helped by a ball moving around the screen and the person has to follow it. She says that using this method people can strengthen their eye muscles, and while the idea was to help her friend’s uncle, Jain believes this app can be used for people with other eye-related conditions.

She now aims to get feedback on the app playground and have it released on the App Store so that other users can deploy the tech for their conditions and eventually help people strengthen all the muscles in the face.

These winners will get a chance to virtually attend the WWDC 2023 keynote starting June 5, along with the other events and labs that are available to the Apple developer community.