This article is best read as a snapshot of the older in-person WWDC scholarship model, not as a timeless rulebook.
The article explains a period when Apple awarded a limited number of student tickets
for WWDC and covered more than just conference entry. It was aimed at students around
the world and centered the application on a Swift Playground project
rather than a fixed challenge prompt.
The practical value of the post is its breakdown of the submission pieces: what you had to build, what you had to write, and what kind of student-status proof you had to prepare. That structure still makes the article useful as historical context.
The article describes a scholarship that offered both access and support for attending WWDC in person.
According to this article, Apple used to award roughly 350 student tickets worldwide for WWDC, except in the year when the conference moved online. The post also says the award included lodging support for conference attendance and one year of access to the Apple Developer Program.
The main deliverable was a Swift Playground that expressed your own idea, not a narrow contest prompt.
One of the better points in this article is that applicants were not being told
to build one specific kind of app. The submission was a Swift Playground
on a topic of your choice. The important constraint was compatibility: it had to run
both on Mac and on iPad.
That pushed the project toward clarity, portability, and a self-contained demo. For a scholarship submission, that matters more than turning the Playground into a large production app. The article frames the work as a focused piece of interactive storytelling through code.
After the Playground, the application asked for short written context around what you built and, optionally, how you share coding with others.
The first essay described your Playground: what it did, which features it used, and which technologies or frameworks were involved. This article quotes Apple's own wording and keeps the limit simple: explain the work in 500 words or less.
The second essay was optional and focused on community. It asked whether you had shared or considered sharing your coding knowledge and enthusiasm for computer science with other people. Again, the article keeps the limit grounded at 500 words or less.
You also needed proof that you were currently a student or part of a STEM organization.
The article keeps this part short, but it matters. The application was not only a creative submission. It also required evidence that you met the eligibility requirement as a current student or learner in a qualifying STEM context.
In other words, the submission package was made of three layers: the Playground, the written explanation, and the status verification. Leaving any of those out would have weakened the application regardless of project quality.
This article closes with practical ways to study past scholarship work instead of guessing what a strong submission looks like.
This is one of the most useful sections in this article. Rather than giving only abstract advice, it points readers toward example repositories, demo videos, and discussion spaces where past scholarship work was visible.
Useful links from this article:
Official WWDC 2019 scholarship page
GitHub examples and related repositories
Unofficial WWDC 2018 scholarship YouTube playlist
WWDC scholarships discussion forum
The closing note is important because it anchors the article in a specific moment: the older scholarship rules plus the unusual WWDC 2020 online transition.
The post says applications usually opened in February or March, then immediately warns that the guidance came from the 2017 to 2019 cycles and should not be assumed to stay unchanged. It also notes that WWDC 2020 had already closed and would be held online.
That caveat is the right way to preserve this page today. The article is useful as a documented view of how the process worked at that time, especially for understanding what Apple valued in those older student submissions.