Eligibility and requirements

The Swift Student Challenge is designed for student developers who are cultivating their software development skills. Make sure to review the current eligibility conditions to confirm that you’re qualified to participate. Please note that we can’t accept submissions from applicants who are employed as professional developers.

Applying

To be eligible for the Challenge, you can not be employed full time as a developer, and at the time you submit your app playground you must:

  • Meet the minimum age for requirement for your country or region as follows:
    • 14 years of age or older in Austria, Bulgaria, China mainland, Cyprus, Israel, Italy, Lithuania, South Korea, and Spain.
    • 15 years of age or older in Czechia, France, Greece, Peru, and Slovenia.
    • 16 years of age or older in Brazil, Croatia, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Kosovo, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Malaysia, Netherlands, Philippines, Poland, Romania, Singapore, and Slovakia.
    • 13 years of age or older in all other countries and regions.
  • Be registered for free with Apple as an Apple developer or be a member of the Apple Developer Program; and
  • Fulfill one of the following requirements:
    • Be enrolled in, or have graduated within the last 90 days from, an accredited academic institution or official homeschool equivalent, or an Apple Developer Academy;
    • Be enrolled in a STEM organization’s educational curriculum; or
    • Have graduated from high school or equivalent within the past 6 months and be awaiting acceptance or have received acceptance to an accredited academic institution.

You can receive a Swift Student Challenge award up to three times. You may be selected as a Distinguished Winner one time only.

Building your app playground

Create an interactive scene in an app playground that can be experienced within three minutes. Be creative.

Requirements:

  • Your submission must be an app playground (.swiftpm) in a ZIP file.
  • Your creation should not rely on a network connection and any resources used in your app playground should be included locally in the ZIP file. Submissions will be judged offline.
  • Your ZIP file can be up to 25 MB.
  • Your submission must be created by you as an individual or a template modified by you as an individual. Group work will not be considered. You may include third-party open source licensed code and/or public domain images and sounds, with credit and an explanation of why it was used.
  • Your app playground must be built with and run on Swift Playground 4.6 or Xcode 26, or later. You may incorporate the use of Apple Pencil.
  • All content should be in English.

Full Terms and Conditions