Burnaby highschooler wins Apple’s Swift Student Challenge

Apple’s new Vision Pro VR headset wasn’t the only news of note for Vancouverites at the company’s Worldwide Developers Conference last week.

Local Burnaby student Omar Abu Sharar was announced as one of the winners of the conference’s Swift Student Challenge: a competition for high school students across the world to create an app in Apple’s Swift Playgrounds. Participants had to develop an interactive scene for the software that could be experienced within three minutes.

Out of the 350 winners, only six were from Canada, and Sharar was the sole B.C. beneficiary. The judges scored the apps based on their creativity and technical accomplishment.

“I built a mental health app called Mentality,” Sharar told Vancouver Tech Journal. “It guides you through parts of mental health such as, ‘What is it? What are hazards to mental health? What are mental illnesses and things you can do to aid your mental health, such as deep breathing?’ And then at the end, there's a quiz to recap the learning of the person who used it.”

For Sharar, the decision to create the app was personal.

“Before the challenge started, when I was doing my studies, my mental health wasn't the greatest because of all the stress, and I wanted to look for ways to aid it and improve it,” he recalls. “But the competition happened to be right around the corner. So I decided to make an app that teaches about mental health, so that it teaches me about mental health, and it teaches whoever uses it about mental health.”

Sharar’s app primarily focused on anxiety and depression, and the root causes of those conditions, including stress. Although a lot of the app was text- and fact-based, he says he’s most proud of the activities he designed to help improve symptoms.

“I made this deep breathing activity, and it pulses to guide you through some deep breathing,” he says. “I made a diary activity for someone to keep track of their thoughts, and how their day is going, because it's important to reflect on your mental health. And I made a quiz at the end, which is like a drag-and-drop quiz to remind the user of what they learned.”

The 16-year-old first got into coding in 2020, when his elementary school assigned a project that allowed him to research whatever he’d like. He chose app development. After taking classes in Python to cement his understanding of the conceptual and theoretical side of coding, he excelled at the skill. Now, he’s the president of the programming club at his school, Burnaby South Secondary.

Among other prizes, including exclusive Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference clothing and a pair of AirPods Pro, Sharar has won a one-year membership to the Apple Developer Program. He hopes to use the experience to continue to develop his coding expertise.

“I want to work on my mental health app, Mentality,” he says. “And I also have an app I'm working on that rethinks how you should study, and how you should approach learning. I'm really excited to release it in a couple of months.”