Feature: Chinese student wins Apple Swift challenge with passion and skill in coding

SAN FRANCISCO, June 17 (Xinhua) -- "It's a wonderful feeling to realize my ideas are valuable, and through coding I can share them with the world," said Han Chubo, a Chinese college student who won Apple's 2022 Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC22) Swift Student Challenge.

The Swift Student Challenge is part of the WWDC22 held earlier this month, along with the keynote, events, labs, and workshops available online and free to over 34 million Apple developers. Every year in the lead-up to the WWDC, young people from around the globe use Swift Playgrounds to showcase their coding passion and skills.

Han, a sophomore from the Beijing Jiaotong University, was among more than 350 students from 40 countries and regions who had been selected as 2022 challenge winners, each demonstrating their coding and problem-solving skills by submitting an original Swift playground to earn a spot.

Han participated in the competition for the first time with his project called Genetics Lab, an app with which users can grow plants and crossbreed them virtually, observe and study the principles of inheritance.

"This idea has been around for a long time. We all learned about biological genetics in high school, but the process from sowing to harvesting is time-consuming. My Swift Playgrounds work simulated a genetic experiment by growing different types of tomatoes and crossing them, so the users can easily observe the traits of their offspring," he said.

Han attended a virtual meetup for a dozen of Swift Student Challenge winners during the WWDC22 and shared his thoughts on the work with Apple CEO Tim Cook.

"The talented student developers I met today are going places! They let their passion for coding and creative problem-solving shine through in areas as diverse as gardening, gaming, quantum physics, and more. Never stop innovating!" said Tim Cook after meeting with them.

Han was excited to show his Swift playground to Cook along with other student winners. "I felt the same passion and saw a wider world in them. It's like crossing something off your bucket list. It gave me a deeper sense of accomplishment."

"I won't stop where I am now, as a winner of the competition, I have a plan to set up an iOS Club in my school," Han said.

His success is a microcosm of Chinese students' passion for coding. Since 2016, the China Collegiate Computer Competition Mobile Application Innovation Contest has attracted more than 20,000 students and helped more than 250 colleges and universities set up iOS clubs.

"My major is software engineering. I'm determined to continue on this path and use the coding skills to create more useful apps that benefit people," he added. For instance, Han said he hoped to create an app in the future that could help people with color vision deficiency share and compare with normal-vision people the color difference they see.

In recent years, Chinese developers have thrived on App Store in China and abroad. Registered developers from Greater China on Apple's App Store have reached 5 million, up from 4.4 million about a year ago. Of all the small developers new to the App Store in 2021, 23 percent was from China, 14 percent from the United States, Apple announced ahead of the WWDC22.

Chinese developers continued to build new businesses and innovate in the rapidly changing environment in the past two years, creating one of the most thriving and prosperous global markets today, Apple said.