Two Taiwanese students were among the winners of Apple Inc’s 2021 Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC21) Swift Student Challenge and have been invited to attend the virtual convention on Monday.
The annual challenge requires students to demonstrate their coding and problem-solving skills by submitting an original Swift playground program using an iPad or Mac to earn a spot.
One of the winners was Ku Ho-hsiang (顧賀翔), a senior student at National Taiwan Ocean University’s Department of Computer Science and Engineering.
Ku, 22, said he had just learned about the Swift user interface (UI) during an iOS coding course last year and this was his first submission to the WWDC.
In under two weeks, he was able to use the Swift UI, a clock and 3D effects to create a mini-game called Time Flies. The game’s goal is for players to stop the timer at a designated time, testing players’ sensitivity to time.
Ku said his inspiration for the game came from the 2014 movie Lucy (露西), which he said shows how we know less about time than we think.
If we could control the flow of time, perhaps we could fast forward past this COVID-19 pandemic and return to normal life, Ku said.
Ku said he learned coding when he started studying at the university, and is considering finding a job relating to artificial intelligence, machine learning or developing iOS applications.
For students who are thinking of entering the next WWDC, Ku said “creativity is the most important asset” that one can have.
How creativity is expressed is a moot point as there are many ways of expression, and one should not hesitate to look for what they feel would be a good way of expressing their creativity, Ku said, adding that they should not shy away from using methods used before if they feel it would work.
The other winner is Feng Chia University’s Hsueh Chun-yu (薛竣祐), who won an award for the second year in a row.
Hsueh, 21, started studying coding and programming in college and currently heads the university’s iOS Club.
His award-winning work, Hello World, was developed using ARKit and SpriteKit.
The theme of the mini-game is racial equality, to make people aware of how to be more accepting of others, through the game’s characters’ way of greeting, he said.
While his project was rife with technical issues due to his unfamiliarity with the tool kits used, Hsueh said he was overall satisfied with the product.
He added that he hoped one day to work for Apple as a program engineer.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching