12-year-old programmer in Hong Kong tackles Apple’s first student coding contest
The Swift Student Challenge brings together young coders worldwide to show off their skills
As developers across the globe await the start of Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference on June 22, a group of young programmers will soon find out which of them won the tech giant’s first coding competition for kids.
To move an animated cyclops character through an increasingly complicated set of digital mazes, players have to make use of the programming concepts they picked up along the way. Once they finish the lessons, kids can build their own mini projects in the app using Swift.
Jacob Prohaska, a 12-year-old student at Renaissance College in Hong Kong, is one of the youngest entrants in Apple’s new competition. An avid Dungeons & Dragons player, he said he has always loved creating his own games and wanted a way to digitize them. Playgrounds became his starting point.
“In around Year 3 [at school], I found out about this app called Swift Playgrounds. And I had a lot of fun tinkering with it, trying out the different features and just having fun with it,” said Prohaska as he opened Playgrounds on his iPad to explain the fundamentals of Swift coding to adult noobs like me.
Working through levels in Playgrounds requires a decent amount of patience and concentration, something you don’t always find in kids his age -- except maybe when they’re playing Fortnite or Minecraft. I asked Prohaska to show me a stage that he had never worked on. For around 10 minutes, his mind was solely focused on solving the puzzle in front of him and explaining to me his thought process.
