Student wins Apple Swift challenge with caring eyes

SAN FRANCISCO — "Application development is more than just writing code. It is a form of creative expression, and I love the journey of building something from scratch," says Xu Tianyu, a Chinese university student who won Apple's 2025 Worldwide Developers Conference Swift Student Challenge.

Xu, a senior student at the Shanghai Institute of Technology, was among 350 students selected globally as winners of the 2025 challenge.

She was also one of 50 distinguished winners recognized for outstanding submissions and invited to Apple's Cupertino campus for a three-day experience during the WWDC week.

Xu says she participated in the competition for the first time with her Swift Playground project called SignBridge, which aims to address communication among people with and without hearing loss on campus.

When designing SignBridge, her primary goal was to create an intuitive and engaging experience for the users who are new to sign language.

"My university in Shanghai offers special education classes for students with hearing loss, where teachers rely on sign language interpreters during instruction. I noticed that, due to communication barriers, few students without hearing loss are able to directly communicate with students who have hearing loss, using sign language," Xu explains.

The Swift Student Challenge is part of the WWDC25, which took place from June 9 to 13, featuring keynote events, labs and workshops available online and free for millions of Apple developers. Each year, in the lead-up to WWDC, young people from around the world use Swift Playgrounds to showcase their coding passion and skills.