India¡¯s Palash Taneja's COVID-19 Tool Wins Apple's Global Student Challenge

We all can¡¯t wait for Apple¡¯s WWDC2020 event this year, and while we anticipate the new offerings Apple will showcase to the developers around the world, it has gone ahead and announced 350 winners of its Swift Student Challenge from over 41 different countries and regions.

And among the 350 is Delhi¡¯s Palash Taneja.

Apple

Palash Taneja developed a Swift Playground tool (based on a coding-learning platform developed by Apple) to teach people coding while making them learn how maintaining social distancing and wearing masks can help slow the spreading of the novel coronavirus.

He decided to create this solution after he noticed many around the world weren¡¯t taking the COVID-19 pandemic seriously.

Palash Taneja using skills to educate

Someone who loves promoting education, when in India, in his teenage years, Palash Taneja volunteered to teach English and mathematics to kids who couldn¡¯t afford to pay for tuitions.

While he¡¯s just finished his freshman at the University of Texas, before leaving for the US, he created a program that could translate popular online education videos into 40 languages to help kids to receive quality education on the web without coming across any language barrier.

He says, ¡°I really enjoy working with children, and I think education is one of the things that can create the biggest impact in someone¡¯s life, especially someone in a developing country.¡±

Palash Taneja's beginning in code

Palash Taneja wasn¡¯t always interested in coding. However, around four years ago, he contracted a severe case of dengue fever that left him in a week state for months.

He said, ¡°That whole experience of two to three months of suffering ¡ª I think that really inspired me to learn programming and to use it as a problem-solving tool.¡± He eventually created a web-based tool that predicts how mosquito-borne disease like dengue spread.

Apple

Apple WWDC 2020

Taneja, along with 349 others, will collaborate and learn more about the field of programming with over a global community of over 23 million developers at this year¡¯s WWDC (Worldwide Developers Conference) on June 22. For the first time in 31 years, WWDC will be an online-only conference to help developers connect, share and create.

This is also the event where Apple showcases what the new iOS, WatchOS, MacOS and iPadOS versions of Apple devices would look like, and new features that the developers will bring to the table.