App-solutely incredible: Student’s app announced as winner in global competition!

Congratulations to Year 11 student, Alfie, who has been named as winner in the 2023 Swift Student Challenge, organised by Apple Inc.

The annual programming competition invites students from across the world, up to and including university level, to create an interactive app playground using Apple’s Swift Playgrounds app. Alfie was one of 350 winners from thousands of entries from 41 different countries and regions worldwide. As a result, amongst other prizes, Alfie has been presented with the opportunity to sit an exam to become an officially certified iOS developer.

Alfie’s app focused on cyber-security, featuring a “how secure is your password” calculator, a secure password generator and an information section to learn how to be cyber-safe.

Alfie began teaching himself how to code two years ago, and started to develop his own apps at the beginning of 2022. Alfie shared with us, “I was inspired to enter the challenge as it gave me a chance to test my programming skills against others – as well as give me an idea on how much progress I had made.”

Remarkably, this is the second time Alfie has won the Swift Student Challenge, having also won last year with a logo-creator app.

Alfie has shown great promise in the coding world, and we look forward to seeing what he challenges himself to next.

At WGS, students are introduced to basic concepts of programming as early as Year 3, by playing simple games where they solve puzzles by creating algorithms. By Year 6, students are using HTML to create websites in Enrichment time. In Senior School, programming forms a key part of computing lessons. During their time at WGS, students learn Scratch, Small BASIC, Python, and HTML. In Code Club, students may also learn additional languages including C and JavaScript.

To find out more about our curriculum, come along to our Whole School Open Day on Saturday 7th October 2023.