The program is part of Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), a yearly event in which the company challenges students all around the world to design an original app playground using the Swift coding language.

The winners were  given a yearlong membership in the Apple Developer Program, a personalized pin set, AirPods Pro, and unique WWDC23 outerwear as reported by Afrotech.

Yemi said he began learning how to code while playing shortstop for his school’s baseball team when he was a middle school team. He was able to strengthen his knowledge after being introduced to a website called Code Academy by middle school students in Germany.

“In middle school, I felt that power one day when my first language was Java Script and the first task was to get rid of pop-up windows in a web browser,” he said.

”And all it took was one single line of code and it just felt so powerful. I really recreated things that I face as a user, so now, I’m not just a user, I’m a creator. To hone my skills, whenever I have a concept or idea, I’d try to build it,” he added.

He mentioned that he usually creates games and programs for people to use while studying. Yemi said he wanted to apply for the scholarship the year before but was unable to due to schedule difficulties with class.

Yemi stated that he often moved around to different areas of the world since his parents were senior clinical data managers and loved to travel before his family eventually settled in the United States.

He said he had long imagined creating an application around a sport and working at Hawk-Eye Innovations as a machine learning engineer further sparked his interest,

Yemi said he has always envisioned submitting his application to Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference Swift Student Challenge.  However, it was until his final year in college that he became intentional with his desire.

Yemi said he almost had a stumbling block that could have eliminated him from the challenge. One minute before the submission, his browser crashed. “The main thing I learned was just to keep trying. Almost every hurdle I faced when I was submitting the challenge, I almost thought I wanted to give up,” he expressed.

“I remember one minute before the submission, my web browser crashed. So all my responses, all the things I wrote, were basically gone, and I didn’t back them up. So, there’s like a minute left so I quickly have to write out there, right, one sentence or even just one-word responses and just quickly submitted my experience,’ he added.

With this scholarship, Yemi plans to refine the apps he submitted and publish them on the App Store. He hopes to produce a more sophisticated version of his program, Diamond Duel.

Yemi is currently studying Computer Science at Kennesaw State University and works as a software engineering intern at an international sports technology organization.