Magazine 2018

Q&A Session L e a r n e r s M a k i n g W a v e s Thé App Guru Stephan Cilliers, currently in Grade 12, is an enthusiastic young entrepreneur and ardent programmer who already has a rich portfolio of work as testament to his passion. He has always been intrigued by technology and coding is one of his most prized skills. Some of the apps that he has developed and released onto Apple’s App Store include Afrikaans Simple Learning (one of his first), Simple Learning: Time and Safer Web. In 2016, while in Grade 10, Stephan was able to prove his coding skills by going through to the exclusive Third Round of the Computer Programming Olympiad. In the realm of academics, Stephan is a high achiever and one of the top candidates for Information Technology. He has broadened his IT knowledge by accumulating international certifications by finishing courses such as the CompTIA IT Fundamentals, A + and N + courses. Born in 2000, Stephan’s first attempt to learn to code was with a programming language called C ++ , which quickly led him to start coding in Python and then Swift. Apart from coding, Stephan also has a passion for Robotics. Stephan always has many small programming projects running in parallel, most of which are coded in either Swift or Python – two of his favourite programming languages. For this reason, he is a frequenter on GitHub.  – Marcel Erasmus You have received full scholarship from Apple to attend the Apple Worldwide Developer Conference, held in California, three times in a row. How have these conferences broadened your view on application development? At the conference there are dozens of sessions throughout the week that explain new features, updates and additions to Apple development frameworks. While these are informative, the real value is gained from interacting with the people attending the conference, Apple engineers and fellow scholarship winners. When you have a discussion with a developer about what they are working on, what they are using, and how their app /framework works, you tend to learn a lot more than you typically would by attending sessions, which are available to watch online anyway. The knowledge gained from these interactions often also goes beyond iOS development and touches on many different aspects of software development in general. Besides learning new things, the conference has allowed me to build a network of international developer friends. Tell us a bit more about your Simple Learning: Time, Safer Web and Simple Learning: Afrikaans apps Simple Learning Afrikaans was the first app developed by the app development club near the end of 2014. It serves as a soundboard to help teach basic Afrikaans vocabulary and has a farm scene and a city scene. Simple Learning Time was developed as a replacement for an application that was taken off the App Store which was being used by the Preparatory Faculty to assist teachers with teaching learners time. It was developed by myself and Luke Bowles contributed as a designer. It’s being used by several schools internationally and has been installed over 30,000 times. Safer Web is a simple browser that is based on the Kiddle search engine. It aims to keep junior internet users safe when doing research for school projects. Who has been the most influential person in your career so far? It’s very difficult to credit one person for being the most influential since there are many people that have influenced me to shape who I am today. My parents have always encouraged me to grab every opportunity that comes my way with both hands. The staff at Parklands has always supported that agenda by helping me take advantage of the plethora of opportunities offered to me through and beyond the school over the past 5 years. Are there any cool new developments from Apple which you are excited about for the future? Apple has been investing heavily in augmented reality (AR) over the past couple of years and it’s evident that it is one of their top priorities to optimise the efficiency of these APIs to run on older devices which are less powerful. One of the most exciting potential applications of AR is layering information on top of what your eyes are seeing in the real world instead of viewing it through a phone’s camera on a screen. This combination of optimising efficiency for less powerful devices and investment in AR leads me to believe that they may be working towards eventually releasing a wearable product similar to what Google Glass aimed to be, but turned out to be ahead of its time. Any ideas for a new app which you are working on? There are some ideas in the pipeline. 119. parklands.co.za