Lockdown Diaries Nominee#34 Corantine Times By Anuj Kumar

In 2020, everyone is home and everyone is bored. During this pandemic, all of us are off to various ventures that we’ve been staking since it’s dawn. Some of us are polishing our culinary skills while others are trying to make a social media presence. Like everyone else, I fathomed myself into something that was not only off track with my current academic pursuit but diametrically opposite. I instrumentally utilised this time in learning the basics of designing and coding. While I was honing my skills at the designing realm, I had an opportunity to test my skills. It was May of the infamous 2020 when the tech-giant Apple announced it’s annual scholarship competition WWDC 2020 (Worldwide Developers Conference)- ‘SWIFT Student Challenge’.
In this competition, the participants were required to make an interactive scene using SWIFT PLAYGROUND ( a programming language developed by Apple Inc. for iOS, iPadOS, macOS, watchOS, tvOS, and Linux).
As COVID-19 is the protagonist of this year, I decided to use this theme to uphold my entry. I designed a newspaper named the “CORANTINE TIMES”, which aimed at highlighting the hard work of the frontline workers and could be used to teach children about the laudable work of the real superheroes when the world is facing an invisible nemesis. I made it interactive similar to the infamous newspaper of the Harry Potter series “The Daily Prophet”.
It was the 16th of July, the results for the WWDC 2020- SWIFT Student Challenge had been declared. I was among the 350 winners, declared from thousands of entries, spanning over 41 countries globally. As a reward for my achievement, I won an exclusive Apple jacket one of the only 350 jackets in the world and a pin set. This achievement was instrumental in instilling gleams of hope and motivation in my mind amidst the dark negative breeze that’s been haunting this year.

ReachIvy.com organized an online blog/vlog competition to provide people the unique opportunity to share their lockdown stories using their creativity. The competition met with a fantastic response from participants across 4 continents, and our jury has handpicked the Top 50 entries from them for the Popular Choice Award 2020!

The above entry has been submitted by Anuj Kumar from Chandigarh, India. He is a 20-year-old student of GMCH- 32, Chandigarh. Kudos to Anuj for this beautiful piece!

Show your support and help Anuj win the contest by liking this blog post on all ReachIvy.com’s social media platforms!