WINNING Apple's coveted Swift Student Challenge is one of the best moments for sixteen-year-old Bernard Lim.
The coding challenge, which attracted thousands of students participation worldwide, is created to give an opportunity for student developers to showcase their love of coding by creating their own Swift playground as part of Apple's World Wide Developers Conference 2020 (WWDC20).
Lim is one of the 350 winners selected by Apple with his exhibit on the Solar System. Student developers from all over the world submitted to the Swift Student Challenge by creating an interactive scene in a Swift playground that can be experienced within three minutes.
"I want people to see and realise the beauty of our Solar System and the places beyond it, and envisages alien worlds humans could call home in the near future," says Lim from Lodge National Secondary School in Kuching, Sarawak.
For the project, he incorporated UIKit, ARKit, SceneKit, AVFoundation and Playground Support to create the space-inspired playground.
Interest in tech
Lim has a deep love for technology. At the age of 6 months, he knew how to turn on a computer.
When he turned one, he learned how to shut down a computer.
At age of two, he could open a document and print it.
"I remember once when I printed 99 copies of my aunt's document and got scolded pretty badly. Well, while other kids were playing toys, I was printing piles of my aunt's documents," he recalled.
When he was three, he could install a game and play it, and by the age of 12, he could already replace computer components such as random access memory (RAM) and hard drives.
Lim learned programming at 11 with HTML, and he only learned Swift with Swift Playground on his iPad in 2017.
His iOS coding journey really took off this year due to the extra time he had during the Movement Control Order (MCO) in Malaysia and his first purchase of a MacBook, during the MCO he built his Swift Playground Student Challenge entry over three long days.
Lim took up coding because he found it very satisfying and fun. "What makes it so great to me is that if you put in time, you will see the result and it feels great. Coding is just like building lego, you code and debug, there are lots of ways to deal with it," he said.
"I decided to code using Apple's Swift because I always wanted to build apps and Swift is stable, easy and well-designed," said Lim, who is also the secretary of his school's computer and robotics club. He dreams of becoming a computer scientist. He also wants to be an ethical hacker as he wants data to be kept safe and believes privacy is a fundamental human right.
" I want to invent artificial intelligent robots that can help find a vaccine or a cure to diseases. This robot that I dreamt about can understand viral protein structures well, analyse data that it collected and hopefully produce a vaccine that works well. This could shorten the vaccine production period down to weeks as it works 24/7," he said.
Lim was very happy and pleased when he knew that his project was chosen as one of the winning entries.
"I feel pleased and proud to be a winner of the Swift Student Challenge. This will motivate me to pursue a career in the IT Field and boost my self-confidence," he said.
Future in coding
As coding and technology have a promising future, he encourages students to try their hands at it.
"Go reach for your dreams. Never give up on your dreams, or your dreams will give up on you. Start exploring those amazing technologies and start coding," he said.
"Go watch free coding tutorials online. We, kids born in this period of time, are blessed with the Internet and we must use it wisely," he added. He believes coding is a fundamental skill to have in the 21st century.
"Coding is neither hard nor easy, but 'determination' is the key to your success. Start now and I believe you can do it," he said.
Winners of the Swift Student Challenge will receive an exclusive WWDC20 jacket and pin set, which will be more coveted than ever this year as an even more limited number than ever will be given out.
Students are an integral part of the Apple developer community. Last year, WWDC saw attendance from more than 350 student developers spanning 37 different countries.