Apple's WWDC 2025 Swift Student Challenge Now Live

Monday February 3, 2025 9:35 am PST by Juli Clover

Apple's 2025 Swift Student Challenge kicked off today, which means that students from around the world can showcase their coding skills and creativity by developing app concepts using Swift Playground or Xcode.

2025 Swift Student Challenge
Students have had time to prepare because Apple announced that the challenge would be held in February 2025 way back in October 2024, plus Apple gave an exact date in January. Apple also hosted an online session to provide students with info on participating in the challenge, with tips from former Challenge winners and Apple engineers.

Apple holds the Swift Student Challenge each year. In past years, it has been timed with the Worldwide Developers Conference, but in 2024, Apple began holding it earlier in the year. Students are tasked with creating an app concept, with Apple providing Develop in Swift tutorials to help students learn the foundations of coding.

Apple plans to select 350 winners based on "innovation, creativity, social impact, or inclusivity." 50 of the winners will be invited to spend three days at Apple Park in Cupertino, California this summer. The trip is expected to coincide with the 2025 Worldwide Developers Conference.

Submissions are open as of today, and will remain open for a three-week period before judging begins. Students can learn more through Apple's developer website.

Tag: Swift Playground

Popular Stories

iPhone 18 Pro Launching Later This Year With These 12 New Features

Wednesday March 18, 2026 7:39 am PDT by Joe Rossignol

While the iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max are not expected to launch for another six months or so, there are already plenty of rumors about the devices. It was initially reported that the iPhone 18 Pro models would have fully under-screen Face ID, with only a front camera visible in the top-left corner of the screen. However, the latest rumors indicate that only one Face ID component...

• 78 comments

Here Are Apple's Release Notes for iOS 26.4

Wednesday March 18, 2026 11:56 am PDT by Juli Clover

Apple provided developers and public beta testers with the release candidate versions of iOS 26.4 and iPadOS 26.4, which means we're going to see a public launch as soon as next week. The RC versions of the software include Apple's official release notes, giving us final details on what's included in the update. Apple Music - Playlist Playground (beta) generates a playlist from your...

• 102 comments

Apple Has Now Unveiled Eight New Products This Month

Tuesday March 17, 2026 9:25 am PDT by Joe Rossignol

Apple has unveiled a whopping eight new products so far this March, including an iPhone 17e, iPad Air models with the M4 chip, MacBook Air models with the M5 chip, MacBook Pro models with M5 Pro and M5 Max chips, the all-new MacBook Neo, an updated Studio Display, a higher-end Studio Display XDR, and now the AirPods Max 2 this week. iPhone 17e features the same overall design as the iPhone...

Top Rated Comments

macduke

15 months ago

I lost my job as a web developer a few weeks ago before Christmas. A couple weeks ago I decided to learn Swift and started building a simple game for fun and to do something productive to take my mind off of the bad situation I'm in. Since then the game has taken on a life of its own with deeper complexity, multiple modes advanced features, and I have been doing playtesting with my kids and their friends and taking notes to balance everything.

This is some of the most fun that I've ever had as a developer, and I feel like I may have found a new calling. The game is actually pretty fun, and my kids are becoming addicted to it, lol, and they're just playing the iPhone build on their iPad. I still need to add iPad support. And the game has such simple controls that I think I may also add Apple TV support, although latency may become an issue with the remote since it requires such fast reflexes. It's a great little mobile time killer that is a lot of fun too, with simple satisfying graphics and sound, and a gameplay loop that keeps you wanting to come back to beat your high score over and over again.

Swift is an amazing language. It's fairly easy to work with and understand, and Xcode is a great IDE that does a really good job with giving feedback about different issues. I hardly have issues that make it through to the build and crash the game. The SpriteKit/GameKit/GameplayKit stuff is really great. I love that it can just handle physics interactions simply and easily. The code is very cleanly structured and concise as well. Xcode itself can be a bit overwhelming, but I'm getting the hang of it. I'm still very early, and part of me kinda hopes I have a bit longer before one of these places decides to hire me because I'm having so much fun learning this.

My goal is to get this thing onto the App Store by the end of next month! I'm just concerned about how crowded the store is nowadays—my app will probably get lost in the sea of apps. I'll probably give out a bunch of codes for it here when it launches, maybe even do some beta testing in the forums with people. Wish I was eligible to submit to this contest! But I'm just somebody's dad.

Score: 2 Votes (Like | Disagree)