Meet a Swift Student Challenge Winner Attending Apple’s WWDC

“Rising up in LA, I’ve all the time been conscious of the wildfire dangers that include dwelling in Southern California,” Marina Lee, a 21-year-old pc science pupil on the College of Southern California, tells Entrepreneur. “However the urgency really hit dwelling when my grandmother discovered herself within the evacuation zones through the latest LA wildfires again in January — she referred to as me as a result of she received an evacuation alert on her cellphone.”

^{Picture Credit score: Courtesy of Apple. Marina Lee.}

Lee remembers being overwhelmed by the state of affairs and uncertain of what to pack, the place to go and easy methods to keep up to date. Realizing that so many different folks have been in all probability experiencing the identical confusion and concern, she determined to construct an app to unravel the issue: EvacuMate.

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Lee’s EvacuMate helps customers put together an emergency guidelines of important gadgets, add copies of vital paperwork by way of their iPhone digital camera roll and import emergency contacts by their iPhone’s contacts checklist. The app additionally permits customers to observe air high quality ranges and put collectively a first-aid equipment.

^{Picture Credit score: Courtesy of Marina Lee}

It took Lee about one month to develop the app and submit it to Apple’s Swift Scholar Problem, a contest that invitations college students throughout the globe to enter their authentic app playgrounds constructed with Apple’s Swift coding language.

Most college students start getting ready their submissions months prematurely, so the deadline “felt somewhat tight,” Lee notes. Nevertheless, she was able to rise to the event, having began her coding journey in center college and accomplished a number of tasks within the years since.

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As a “very inventive” individual, Lee first targeted on the app’s design and format, she says. Then she turned her consideration to the sensible options. Lee requested family and friends for suggestions as she labored on EvacuMate, and the “very collaborative course of” allowed her to have interaction along with her target market and perceive how they’d work together with the app.

^{Picture Credit score: Courtesy of Marina Lee}

“I  undoubtedly sit up for assembly different Swift Scholar Problem winners [at WWDC].”

Out of this 12 months’s 350 successful submissions, Lee was chosen as one of many 50 distinguished winners invited to attend the Worldwide Builders Convention (WWDC) at Apple Park. The 2025 convention, which takes place in-person and on-line from June 9-13, kicks off with CEO Tim Cook dinner’s keynote tackle and can showcase the corporate’s new expertise and software program.

A few of this 12 months’s different distinguished winners embody Taiki Hamomoto, 22, of Japan, whose app Hanufada Ways teaches customers easy methods to play the normal Japanese card sport; Luciana Ortiz Nolasco, 15, of Mexico, whose app BreakDownCosmic provides a digital gathering place for astronomy fanatics; and Nahom Worku, 21, who grew up in Ethiopia and Canada and developed the app AccessEd, which offers studying sources which might be obtainable with or with out Wi-Fi connectivity.

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“I  undoubtedly sit up for assembly different Swift Scholar Problem winners [at WWDC] and different builders basically from the world over,” Lee says. “All through my years of involvement within the hackathon neighborhood, I have been in a position to construct lasting friendships and connections with college students from all the world over, nevertheless it was solely by a digital setting. So attending this convention would actually deliver that have in individual.”

Lee is at present interning as a front-end engineer at Amazon in Seattle, Washington. The function focuses on internet design and constructing consumer interfaces, a course of that, like coding, additionally offers her the prospect to get inventive, she says. She hopes to pursue related work that enables her to merge her ardour for creativity, artwork and coding after she graduates from school.

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Different younger individuals who need to learn to code and probably pursue an engineering profession ought to take into account taking part in hackathons, 24-48-hour occasions the place college students collaborate on tasks and attend workshops, Lee says. Lee remembers being intimidated at first, however the expertise laid the inspiration for the place she is now.

“I met some new pals that I nonetheless be in contact with to today,” Lee says. “[The experience] allowed me to be taught extra about coding and change into extra concerned within the hackathon neighborhood. I began organizing some [hackathons] myself and mentoring at different hackathons. It is a good first step in coding and actually permits you to [join] the neighborhood.”