Two Kiwi students shine in Apple's global coding competition

1News

2 days ago

Two 16-year-olds from New Zealand have been named among Apple's Swift coding competition winners for 2025.
Alex Liang from Westlake Boys High School and Ben Lawrence from Kaiapoi High School were named among the 350 winning submissions from the tech giant's global competition associated with the Worldwide Developers Conference.
Applicants span the globe, representing 38 countries and regions, and incorporating a wide range of tools and technologies.
Liang's entry called Make A Wish follows his success last year as the only winner from New Zealand, this time using maths to predict a meteor path, track it in the sky and capture pictures of meteor showers from a phone, rather than a meteor camera.
He said he vividly remembered standing outside in May 2021, holding his mother's phone up for three hours and being "very happy and proud of myself" when he finally captured a meteor on camera — but it was time consuming.
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"My app is focused on meteors because many people actually try to see meteors and then try to take a picture of it. Right now, the cheapest way to capture a meteor without having to endure it is to use a meteor camera."
Alex Liang demonstrates his app to a fellow student. (Source: Supplied)
For Liang, it's the second year in a row that he has been named as a winner and he said there had been a "very clear rise" in the number and calibre of applicants this year, and in the use of Artificial Intelligence.
"And so this year, unlike last year, I mentioned little planets, which was no AI at all. But this year I did actually implement AI/machine learning in the form of object detection."
Liang said he was "not surprised at all" that Apple had decided to allow the use of AI in the competition this year but all usage had to be disclosed.
"In fact, I was expecting it. Without AI, many of the things from the app I made would not be possible.
"I use it to bump up my efficiency sometimes because I do actually use AI to debug and stuff and then sometimes to create new features or learn new frameworks. But using it does not mean you have to rely entirely on it.
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"You have to understand your code top to bottom, every single line, not just saying 'hey GPT do something for me, just write me an app that's doing this'. And AI is not able to create things like that just by saying one word."
Liang said planning was already underway for next year's entry, and Make A Wish was being reviewed by Apple to be added to the App Store.
"Words cannot describe the experience. I felt like I stepped up to the whole next level of not just astronomy, but innovation. It is something I'm very profound about, something I'm very happy about."
Helping money make 'Good Cents'
Ben Lawrence pictured using his app, Good Cents. (Source: Supplied)
16-year-old Ben Lawrence from Kaiapoi High School, Christchurch, told 1News he "didn't expect anything" after entering his submission, Good Cents.
The app simulates real-world financial scenarios in which users get a job, spend and save money and navigate complex financial curveballs.
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'You do a quiz on some financial questions like 'What is a good way to spend money?' 'How do you save?' 'What's a budget used for?'.
'And based on that, you'll be awarded points, you'll get promotions and the player can also complete lessons that will teach you certain elements and aspects and then I'll quiz you on it to make sure you've actually read through it."
Throughout the game, Lawrence gave examples of "random events" players could encounter designed to test whether they will spend money or not.
"Oh, the new iPhone came out. You know you already have one, but you want the new one. Do you want to do it, or should you save your money? That kind of thing."
Ben Lawrence's app, 'Good Cents'. (Source: Supplied)
"Or if your savings are low but you have tonnes of money in your spending [the app] might say, 'hey do you want to put some money into your savings, get some interest on it?'."
Lawrence said learning money skills in class could be "pretty boring" and hoped his app could be a way to make learning finances more fun.
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"Just making learning more fun and then also helping people with skills better pretty darn important and going into adulthood."
The app took him three months to develop, and he hoped to launch it on the App Store soon.
'But I'm working on kind of upgrading it, almost making it so it's more of a platform so schools can sign up to it, license it, whatever and you can have classrooms and teachers can assign work to students and certain aspects of it.
'Phones are banned in schools so that's a huge problem, but I'm working on making it so that they can do it through a website now as well.'
An idea that could go 'global'
Denis Vida, Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Western University in Ontario Canada, runs a project called the Global Meteor Network (GMN), which has over 1400 meteor cameras globally across 42 countries.
Liang said he was collaborating the organisation with the goal of sharing his app with the global astronomy community.
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Adjunct Research Professor at the University of Western Ontario. (Source: Supplied)
"Essentially everyone can follow a simple set of instructions and buy very reasonably low-cost hardware and install a meteor camera, then install our open-source software and contribute to the project," Vida said.
He said "you don't really need to know much about space or science" to do so.
"We have a lot of participants in New Zealand who are farmers with no previous context or interest in astronomy, but when they heard about potential meteor fall in their area they got in touch to get a camera installed."
He said Liang reached out to him as one of New Zealand's "strong, well-organised" group of space enthusiasts, and was excited to collaborate with him on a project to solve a common problem.
Vida said the main issue they faced was that people may be told when a meteor event could happen in their area, but won't know where exactly to look or which way to point their phone in the sky.
"Most of the time when people do it, they hold their phone up, they wait for the right time, and it turns out they were looking the completely wrong direction. Or they'll swing the phone and then the only thing they have in the frame is just the fireball with no other reference points.
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"The problem is if we want to make measurements in that, we can't use it. There needs to be stars, it needs to be static or have some kind of reference points."
He said developing an app to solve this problem sounded like the perfect project for programming pro Liang.
"So the idea was let's build an app or some service that people can install where every time something like that happens within a certain radius of you, you'll get a notification and a set of instructions of how to start calibration and the sorts of images to take."
Vida said now that Liang had created the app, the next step was getting it installed on a lot of phones, to get other meteor agencies on board.
"Once we know that, you know things are going to happen and then people are going to install it, they're going to take pictures with the app and then once we show results that's where the app is going to get more established or where people are going to get more recognised."
He said with some more rigorous testing and development of some features, Liang's app would have the potential to have an "oversized impact" globally.
"Impacts of little asteroids happen all over the world in a random way. So something's on the App Store and anyone can download it, that's literally [going to] go global."
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"These challenges are a great way to find talent. You have pretty small investment and you set some sort of a goal, and you find talented people who are inspired by it," he said.