The WWDC Scholarship Competition is an annual event held by Apple every year. You are required to create a playground and submit it in ten days. I have recently took part in this comoption and sadly did not get in, but I did learn a lot. So here are a few tips I should have used during the competition.

The Different Types

First off you must understand the two types of playgrounds. You can create a regular playground, or create a playground book, which can be a tutorial. Also you can choose to have the judges run it on a device or in the simulator.

Creating A Playground Book

A playground book is one of the more common submissions. It is usually a tutorial that runs along side a game or app and teaches the user a core Apple technology. A great example of this is Apple’s default playground.

This is a great example because it incorporates many important coding skills into a fun interactive game. That users can play and learn very easily with little to no typing.

Creating a Playground

A playground is different from that of a playground book in that it does not have separate pages, and is only interacted by the user through the playground window itself. Apple has not released a official non-playground book yet, which is probably why it is most common to see tutorials.

Coming Up With an Idea

The idea is the hardest and most important part of a project. When you are thinking of an idea think of something you can create in a relatively short amount of time that is different and Unique. Create something that focuses on mabey one or two core technologies of Apple. Try to pick a new technology that was just released, and try to find new ways to use it.

A great example of this is something Nathan Gitter created, Rainbrow which was featured at WWDC. Also it should be something you already understand and can do relatively easily and efficiently. Do not try to learn a whole new technology during the competition like I did.

Use Your Resources

When I was looking for help developing my submission I found little resources on how to add features to a playground as they can be implemented in different ways, for example axising the camera.

Apple Developer

A great place to start is to go through the very brief tutorials on the Developer website. It walks through many things that may not be clear coming from IOS app development, like how to run it on a device . To run it on a device you can either AirDrop the project or place it on iCloud drive. Both are not perfect but, so far the only way to get a project to a device.

GitHub WWDC Submissions

The WWDC Submissions github page is an extremely good resource to see the competition the quality bar and much more. Just don’t get carried away and copy someone else, the judges will like new and interesting ideas, also you can get disqualified.

Good Luck

Go create something unique, special and advanced. So you might as well start now. Because there is no such thing as a head start, when the race has already started.