Apple profiles world-changing winners of WWDC Swift Student Challenge

Apple has profiled three winners of its Swift Student Challenge for WWDC 2021, featuring three women who created apps and projects to help people live their lives, as well as to learn to create their own apps.

As part of its pre-WWDC ritual, Apple opened up the Swift Student Challenge to entries in March, inviting students to produce work in Swift to compete for prizes. On Tuesday, Apple profiled three of the participants and things they have created to improve the world.

"Every year, we are inspired by the talent and ingenuity that we see from our Swift Student Challenge applicants," said Susan Prescott, Apple's vice president of Worldwide Developer Relations and Enterprise and Education Marketing. "This year, we are incredibly proud that more young women applied and won than ever before, and we are committed to doing everything we can to nurture this progress and reach true gender parity."

The trio of profiles starts with Gianna Yan, a 16-year-old from Oakland, California, who saw her immunocompromised grandparents struggle to get groceries delivered in Hawaii. Working with her sister, she created Feed Fleet, an app to pair at-risk individuals with volunteers for food deliveries.

Yan went on to join The Farmlink Project, a non-profit to help farms distribute surplus produce to food banks. The project has so far redirected over 30 million pounds of food.

After a visit to a gastroenterologist, 15-year-old Abinaya Dinesh of North Brunswick, New Jersey, was given a diagnosis, but not information on how to get better. Dinesh decided to create Gastro at Home, an app set to launch this summer that will provide access to information and resources about gastrointestinal disorders.

Dinesh has also started a nonprofit, Impact AI, to instill learning and ethical practices in artificial intelligence in young people. This includes an eight-week high school program titled Girls in AI, to teach the basics of programming and machine learning.

Hackathon lover Damilola Awofisayo, a 17-year-old of Woodbridge, Virginia, was frustrated by not being accepted to a number of events in the last year, so decided to start up a new one with a friend.

The non-profit TecHacks was born, made to create a "supportive environment for girls everywhere to create, problem-solve, and showcase their talents alongside like-minded females to compete and work with."

Opened in August 2020, TecHacks has brought together more than 800 people from over 60 countries.

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