MobileMakersEdu Winter Contest—WINNERS ANNOUNCED

A few weeks ago, we ended the window for screencast submissions to the annual MobileMakersEdu Winter Screencast Contest. We had great contest submissions once again from MobileMakersEdu high school students from across the globe. What makes this contest 'real world' is the judging—four iOS developer judges from our community volunteered their time to review the submissions and also provide commentary to fuel students' growth and learning.

And, new this year... SwiftUI! It is an innovative, exceptionally simple way to build user interfaces across all Apple platforms with the power of Swift. Some student dove in this year, and we're exploring building SwiftUI into the curriculum (23-24)—stay tuned for more!

Thank you to the 2022-23 Winter Contest Judges:

• Christian Jimenez - Head of Engineering at Health Note
• Michael Sacks - Mobile Developer at Cloud Trucks
• Rachel Schneebaum - A senior iOS Engineer at Ava
• Wade Sellers - iOS Developer Mentor at MobileMakersEdu and Product Evangelist at Bublup

AND THE WINNERS ARE…

FIRST PLACE

Swift AVAudioPlayer—How to play music and sound in Swift

by Kevin Scanlan and Levi Adams at Grayslake North High School (IL). Teacher, Adam DeCaluwe

• Great idea! The app was dynamic and creative. Very cool! AVAudioPlayer is a great tool to know how to use. There are some big companies that will pay people very well if they are knowledgeable in AVAudioPlayer.

• Great demo but I wish that they had given additional details on how these libraries and technologies are used in the real world as well as why they should use this over others. Overall, great demo!

• Fun, entertaining, and succinctly informative. You explained the required lines of code well and inspired the viewer with what’s possible. If I searched how to play sounds and came across your video, I would’ve been inspired to see if you made more informative tutorial videos showing the other awesome features of your karaoke app I could learn from. Bravo! 

• I can't believe a high school student did this! tackles one of the most complex topics of any of the submissions, and does so with clean code, clear descriptions + explanations, and plenty of polish! Extremely impressive work!! Let me know if/when you're looking for your first iOS dev job.

SECOND PLACE

CA Shape Layer and Animation

by Cole Perry at South-Western Career Academy (OH), Teacher, Derek Fitzer

Judges' Feedback:

• This is a great explanation of a detailed concept. Your example use case was also something general in nature that has typical use cases people seek out, like a progress meter or the views animation that may happen when making a selection. Great job!

• Awesome usage of AVShapeLayer. The AVShapeLayer isn't easy or straightforward, but you were able to figure it out and make a pretty cool animation. Well done!

• Your explanations throughout the demonstration were fantastic! This was a good feature you selected to explain, as well as the example use cases - always important when deciding to code something. Nice work!

THIRD PLACE

Randomized Images and Text

by Citlamina Estrada at Waukesha West High School (WI). Teacher - Brandon Egnarski

Judges' Feedback:

• Nice work showing how to work with the randomization of images as well as text. I like that you handled both concepts together because showing that slight code adjustment is helpful to understand each use better. If someone was searching for how to randomize data to display, I believe this video would succeed in teaching them the basic uses. Nice work!
  
  
• Excellent presentation and delivery: very clear, thorough, and easy to follow, even when explaining some more involved programming topics. Fun idea, too, and a clever way to demonstrate handling different data types... which really bumped this entry up into the top 3 for me!

SwiftUI Winner Spotlight

SwiftUI - How to use AsyncImage in SwiftUI

by Mikolaj Michon at Elk Grove High School (IL). Teacher - Kristen Fisher

Judges Feedback:

• By far the best walkthrough + description + explanation of Swift and even complex SwiftUI topics, demonstrating impressive understanding (as well as development skills)... not to mention choosing one of the newest elements to explore! 
• Fantastic demo. Talked clearly about what he was working on and gave additional information on how it works in reality and its benefits. AsyncImage is also used in real life and was great to show why and how it can be used. Also used SwiftUI for this, which was great!
• Loved that you embraced SwiftUI (something your teacher recently introduced) with a great demo of an important feature! The nice touches on your video production with a YouTube description and the music and branding at the end!

TOP HONORS

How to Create an Animation

by Maddy Pruett at Waukesha North High School (IL), Teacher, Kristin Kamenar

Judges' Feedback:

• The dice application is a very clever use of animations/randomization. I think you should polish it up and release it on the App Store!
  
  

Making a Slideshow Using an UIImageView

by Praylay Ray & Draeden Rowe at Grayslake Central High School (IL), Teacher, Meghan Lynn

• Great demo! Giving real-life examples of how this could be used was great. The only feedback is that the demo felt rushed even when you didn't need to. Should have used more time to pace yourself and use more time to talk through the code and what each piece is doing more thoroughly.

SwiftUI - How to Embed a YouTube App

by Hunter Hartling at Waukesha North High School (IL), Teacher, Kristin Kamenar

Judges Feedback:

• You seem to really understand SwiftUI. It's cool to see students using cutting-edge technologies.  Keep up the good work!

Congratulations and well done!  

Review the prizes and contest rules here.  Thank you all!