Among the developer community, “student developers” are an indispensable reserve force. From the annual Swift Student Challenge to the Mobile App Innovation Competition, Apple is also welcoming more students to join. These competitions are also guiding more student developers to showcase themselves and grow.
Mobile Application Innovation Competition Summer Camp
This year’s Mobile App Innovation Competition was launched in May and the finals will be held in mid-November. The summer camp in mid-to-late August is the preliminary training for this year’s Mobile App Innovation Competition. Student developers from various universities will communicate and learn with Apple’s development experts during the summer camp, and visit companies such as Taobao and ByteDance to understand their future development direction.
During this year’s summer camp, CNMO had the opportunity to visit Zhejiang University, communicate with student developers, and learn a lot of stories behind them.
More than just a “competition”, it is also a platform for student developers to communicate
Wu Wanqi from Zhejiang University believes that summer camp is the best communication platform for student developers:
“There will be some learning material lectures here, and student developers can bring their works to exchange with each other. And the instructors can also provide some guidance based on our works, which will facilitate our subsequent optimization.”
Wu Wanqi is from Zhejiang University (right)
This time, Wu Wanqi and her team members brought an app called “NVWA” (Nu Wa), which is an application that allows more people to get in touch with “ancient book restoration”. General enthusiasts who are interested in ancient books can experience and participate in the process of ancient book restoration through this application, and professional restorers can also share, collaborate and promote ancient book restoration through this application.
NVWA
A total of three students participated in the development of “NWVA”, covering three directions: innovative design, art and museum, and engineering development, which also made this app quite perfect. Wu Wanqi, who was interviewed, is from the Qizhen Interdisciplinary Innovation and Entrepreneurship Laboratory and is responsible for the UI design of the entire app. As a student majoring in art and technology, she considered using the combination of iPad + Apple Pencil when designing the software, so that ancient books can exist in a high-fidelity form on the iPad, and at the same time allow users to directly use Apple Pencil to restore the estimated restoration process, thereby arousing interest in ancient book restoration.
As for the software engineering development, it was led by Lo Kuan-ting from Computer Science and Technology. He had previously participated in App development within the iOS ecosystem and had considerable experience in development.
In an interview, Wu Wanqi said that when they designed this software, they also wanted to truly empower the process of ancient monument restoration. Ancient book restoration is not just about filling in missing characters, but also requires wormhole repair and paper edge segmentation on the original paper of the ancient book. These tasks cannot be achieved at the software level and can only be completed with the help of hardware equipment.
NVWA
To this end, Chen Mingwei, a student from the mechanical engineering department of the team, designed a hardware device for ancient book restoration to be used in conjunction with “NWVA”. This hardware can improve the efficiency of the “rough edge segmentation of paper repair” mentioned above, thereby helping ancient book restorers to complete their work more efficiently.
In addition to communication between student developers, the Mobile App Innovation Competition is also encouraging more student developers to turn their apps into complete works and put them on the shelves, and then achieve success through the empowerment of the Apple ecosystem, because evaluating an app not only involves the dimension of product design, but also commercial considerations.
Wu Wanqi believes that NVWA was designed with commercialization in mind, and her team’s goal is to make all the software and hardware and put them into real restoration work. The team has already established connections with some cultural relics protection agencies, and many people will provide professional support to make this app more complete and successful.
Give creativity more room for imagination
With the help of the Mobile App Innovation Competition, some former student developers have become engineers, college teachers, entrepreneurs in the app field, or joined Apple’s supply chain education program to become trainers, using programming to change their own and others’ future. In order to further help the development of student developers, this year’s competition has added a “Set Sail” track, which aims to provide programming optimization and venture capital docking for young programming enthusiasts who have graduated no more than five years ago and plan to commercially incubate their apps that have been put on the shelves, supporting them in realizing their entrepreneurial dreams.
The “Bee Hero” development team from Beihang University can be said to be an “old friend” of the Mobile Application Innovation Competition. After winning the first prize in the AR track last year, the three students continued to improve their work and participated in the “Setting Sail” track this year.
Wang Yu (left) and Hong Mingkun (center) from Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics
When interviewed, both Hong Mingkun and Wang Yu said that their mentality when attending the summer camp this year was completely different from last year:
“I am in a very relaxed state this year. I just want to experience more.”
“Last year…last year was very stressful, very anxious.”
Bee Hero, designed by three students, is an AR game that encourages children to become bee heroes, explore nature from the first-person perspective of bees, find flowers, and help them spread pollen. The goal of this game is to enhance children’s connection with nature, so that they can understand the importance of ecological protection while enjoying the fun of the game. Bee Hero hopes to guide children to go out of the room, go deep into nature, and actually explore and learn ecological knowledge through this game experience, rather than just staying in the virtual world on the screen.
One year later, Bee Hero has become more complete. “We continue to optimize the development this year. The AR effect is much better than last year, and there are more 3D models,” said Hong Mingkun.
Bee Hero
While improving the software, Bee Hero also focused on the factor of “commercialization” this year. Most of Bee Hero’s users are children who do not have autonomy. However, during research, the team found that more and more parents are willing to pay for high-quality science education apps. Therefore, Bee Hero plans to launch a large number of paid unlocking resources and generate revenue through in-app purchases.
In addition, the “Bee Hero” team also cooperates with some public welfare and environmental protection organizations to obtain certain commercial value by holding events and promoting environmental protection.
Using AR technology, a large number of real objects can enter the digital world. In the eyes of team member Wang Yu, the most successful part of Bee Hero was that he met many environmental experts at the competition last year:
“We can digitize many rare plants growing in the mountains. These rare plants often grow in the jungles of the mountains and are difficult for ordinary people to touch. Through AR technology, we can digitize them and put them in the App.”
Final Thoughts
In recent years, the Mobile App Innovation Competition has not only helped more student developers grow, but also started to pay attention to the future development of student developers. From the newly added “Setting Sail” track this year, we can see that student developers not only need to make a mature App, but also have their own thoughts on the future development of the App, so that programming is not limited to one competition, but programming is integrated into their own thinking, continuous iteration, and rapid growth.
Similarly, this year’s “Summer Camp” also serves as a “communication and mutual assistance platform.” Students from different cities and universities can communicate with more professionals in the summer camp and efficiently solve problems that arise during the development process.
This year’s Mobile App Innovation Competition finals will be held in November. We also look forward to seeing students use their creativity to create more high-quality apps, which will benefit developers, Apple and even every user of Apple devices.
