WWDC 2026 is fast approaching and Apple has highlighted four winners of the Swift Student Challenge app. This year, Apple is highlighting the AI tools that Swift Student Challenge winners are using to bring their ideas to life.
Apple welcomes 50 distinguished Swift Student Challenge winners to its developer conference
Each year, Apple invites 50 of the distinguished Swift Student Challenge winners to attend WWDC. Susan Prescott, Apple’s vice president of Worldwide Developer Relations, says the combination of Swift and AI tools is featured among this year’s winning submissions.
“The depth of creativity we see in the Swift Student Challenge never ceases to amaze us,” said Susan Prescott, Apple’s vice president of Worldwide Developer Relations.
“This year’s winners have found remarkable ways to harness the power of Apple platforms, Swift, and AI tools to create app playgrounds that are as technically impressive as they are meaningful. We are incredibly proud to support their journey and can’t wait to see what they create next.”
The four apps presented by Apple include:
- Steady hands created by Gayatri Goundadkar
- Pitch coach created by Anton Baranov
- Asuo created by Karen-Happuch Peprah Henneh
- LeViola created by Yoonjae Joung
AI tools are part of every developer story this year
Goundadkar created Steady Hands as “a gaming app that uses Apple Pencil stabilization to help people with tremors create art” with help from Claude:
Inspired in part by Apple’s accessibility features like Touch Accommodations, she started by learning SwiftUI concepts, using Anthropic’s Claude to help her unpack lessons on topics like how PencilKit handles stroke data. And to characterize a user’s tremors, she built a tool that analyzes raw movement data from the iPad and Apple Pencil. It captures hand movements and applies signal processing techniques to identify the frequency and intensity of a user’s tremors.
Baranov developed Pitch Coach, which he calls “an Apple Intelligence-powered wingman for Shark tank pitches”, with a mix of Apple’s Foundation Models and Claude Agent in Apple’s Xcode:
To help users overcome presentation anxiety, Baranov leveraged Apple’s Foundation Models framework to generate personalized, contextual feedback and summaries after each session, alerting the user to filler words such as “like” or “um.” He also used Claude Agent in Xcode 26 to translate the app into 20 languages, and consulted friends and colleagues to help him identify filler words in other languages.
Asuo is an app playground that “provides real-time safe routing for people in flood zones.” Henneh also calls on Claude for his coding help:
After designing Asuo’s interface in Figma, Henneh turned to Claude to help her design the rain simulator on her app’s launch screen, as well as implement the A* path-finding algorithm. “Because I’m a designer, I don’t really tackle the very technical parts,” she shares. “I’m counting on the help of the AI agents. Something that would have taken me months could be done in three or four days.”
Joung created LeViola, the “app playground designed to make learning and playing the viola more accessible,” using a combination of Claude, OpenAI Codex, and Google Gemini:
Although Joung has been coding for a long time – when he was a teenager in Seoul, South Korea, he created a timer to control electronics in the classroom and he recently developed an AI companion device for elderly people living alone – he is new to Swift. “When I came up with the idea of using my hands to play the instrument and using the camera overlay to help users navigate their own bow pose, I didn’t know where to start,” he says. To familiarize himself with the coding language, Joung used Claude as well as OpenAI’s Codex and Google’s Gemini. He then experimented with Create ML to train his own model before integrating it into his application using Core ML.
You can learn more about each playground or app app in Apple’s storefront here.
The Apple WWDC 2026 developer conference begins on Monday, June 8. The company is set to unveil iOS 27, macOS 27 and more.
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