Hamilton teen wins Apple app design competition
Shaurya Gupta started coding when he found his homework in Canada was ‘pretty easy’
When Shaurya Gupta first moved to Canada in 2019, one thing took him by surprise.
Coming from a private school in India, the now 13-year-old was used to having lots of homework. But when he started school in Hamilton, he found the work to be “pretty easy,” often getting through his assignments “very quickly.”
To fill his extra time on school nights, Gupta’s parents signed him up for an online coding class. Much to his surprise, he liked it.
That course led to an interest in web development and later Swift, a computer programming language used by Apple. Gupta learned it on his own, with the help of online courses and tutorials, before his twelfth birthday. And now, nearly five years after his parents gave him that initial nudge, the teen’s passion for coding has paid off.
Gupta was recently named one of the winners of Apple’s Swift Student Challenge, a contest where teens design and build their own apps using the coding language.
Gupta is one of 350 winners selected from across the world — more than a dozen of which are from Canada. The prize includes a one-year membership in the Apple Development Program and a pair of AirPod Max headphones.
Gupta only became eligible for the competition earlier this year, and he built his app from the ground up in a little more than a month’s time. He completed the project on his own as neither of his parents has any technical background.
“I didn’t think I would win or anything,” said Gupta, in an interview with The Spectator. “I just thought it would be a nice experience … and to my surprise, I actually won.”
His app, Fizzix, aims to help make learning about Isaac Newton’s three laws of motion more engaging and hands-on for students, as he takes the user through each law with a minigame. At the end, there is a quiz for students to test their knowledge. But how does a seventh grader get hooked on computer science?
Once Gupta finished that initial course, he dove headfirst into coding and app design — using any course or video he could find to learn more.
“It seemed like a pretty cool interest to me, so I decided to go on with it,” said Gupta.
While some may look at learning coding as a colossal task, Gupta said the hardest part was not being able to ask his parents for help. But that barrier was easily removed with the help of the online community, he added. He now sees the skill as a central part of his future.