Two 16-year-olds from New Zealand have been named among Apple’s Swift coding competition winners for 2025.
Alex Liang from Westlake Boys High School and Ben Lawrence from Kaiapoi High School were named among the 350 winning submissions from the tech giant’s global competition associated with the Worldwide Developers’ Conference.
Applicants span the globe, representing 38 countries and regions, and incorporating a wide range of tools and technologies.
16-year-old Ben Lawrence from Kaiapoi High School, told 1News he “didn’t expect anything” after entering his submission, Good Cents.
The app simulates real-world financial scenarios in which users get a job, spend and save money and navigate complex financial curveballs.
“You do a quiz on some financial questions like ‘What is a good way to spend money?’ ‘How do you save?’ ‘What’s a budget used for?’.
“And based on that, you’ll be awarded points, you’ll get promotions, and the player can also complete lessons that will teach you certain elements and aspects, and then I’ll quiz you on it to make sure you’ve actually read through it.”
Throughout the game, Ben gave examples of “random events” players could encounter designed to test whether they will spend money or not.
“Oh, the new iPhone came out. You know you already have one, but you want the new one. Do you want to do it, or should you save your money? That kind of thing.”
“Or if your savings are low but you have tonnes of money in your spending [the app] might say, ‘hey, do you want to put some money into your savings, get some interest on it?’.”
Ben said learning money skills in class could be “pretty boring” and hoped his app could be a way to make learning finances more fun.
“Just making learning more fun and then also helping people with skills better pretty darn important, and going into adulthood.”
The app took him three months to develop, and he hoped to launch it on the App Store soon.
“But I’m working on kind of upgrading it, almost making it so it’s more of a platform so schools can sign up to it, license it, whatever, and you can have classrooms and teachers can assign work to students and certain aspects of it.
“Phones are banned in schools, so that’s a huge problem, but I’m working on making it so that they can do it through a website now as well.”
