KUALA LUMPUR, May 23 — Every year, aspiring student coders from all over the world join the Apple Swift Student Challenge. 

From the best entries, a selected few get not just a certificate and cool prizes but an invitation, travel and board provided, to Apple Park for the Worldwide Developers Conference.

These 50 winners are dubbed Distinguished Winners whose entries have been considered “truly exceptional” by Apple and this year, Malaysian Jasmmender Kaur is among them.

Ipoh-born Jasmmender, 22, is currently pursuing her bachelor’s in computer science at Taylor’s University Malaysia, specialising in data science.

She said her interest in technology started at an early age: “My journey with technology actually started at home at the age of 10 when a curiosity about how things worked led me to my first computer.”

After picking up the basics of computing at school, she soon started using HTML and CSS to code her own websites as well as built mini-games in Scratch.

By the time she was 15, she had also created a tuition centre management system and with Python, created a simple quiz game.

As to how she became acquainted with Apple’s developer ecosystem, she said, “I actually taught myself Swift independently through YouTube tutorials and Apple’s official developer tutorials, documentation and workshops.”

Apps are in themselves solutions, solutions to specific problems and what Jasmmender saw as a challenge was to help people understand what’s actually going on behind AI.

Her app, Unreal, is meant to educate users about how AI works, saying that the name came from what it does, “pulls back the curtain on the inner workings and the technical backgrounds of AI, but in a very friendly and approachable manner.”

With AI already being used in a myriad of ways, at scale, Jasmmender said, “But most people have no understanding of how or why these decisions are being made.”

Jasmmender said that existing information is not tailored as much for the everyday person, either being too formal or targeted at those already in tech. 

“I felt like in Malaysia, AI adoption is growing, but openness without proper understanding is a very dangerous gap,” she said.

She first listed down what she knew about AI, then noted things that she felt would be important for people to understand and know about.

With that base, she then used AI tools like Claude to create a structure and figure out how she could create something that could be translated easily for everyone.

She added, “But I also got advice from my friends as well about things that they wish they knew before they got into AI.”

Jasmmender considered her win as invaluable in many ways.

“It not only gave me the experience and the lessons, but it opened doors to connect with incredible developers and professionals globally, especially through the network from the Apple community,” she said.

It also allowed her a platform to advocate for AI literacy on a much larger scale, something that she is deeply passionate about.

“Everyone deserves to understand the system that’s shaping their world,” she said.

Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference will take place in Apple Park at Cupertino, California from June 8 to 12.

Caption: Jasmmender Kaur learned to code from an early age and is now in her final year studying computer science. — Picture courtesy of Apple