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Apple Introduces Swift Playgrounds App To Teach Kids To Code (theverge.com)
An anonymous reader writes: At their Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco today, Apple CEO Tim Cook said, "We believe coding should be a required language in all schools." To help achieve this goal, Apple introduced Swift Playgrounds, a new app that is meant to teach kids basic coding skills in Apple's chosen language. It teaches concepts like loops and conditionals, and uses an animated character tasked with performing simple challenges in a digital maze to help make learning fun. The app also offers suggested coding languages and will be completely free. Tim Cook described it as "a powerful new way for kids to learn to code," and went on to compare writing code to basic literacy. "I wish Swift Playgrounds was around when I was first learning to code," said Apple's senior vice president of Software Engineering Craig Federighi. "Swift Playgrounds is the only app of its kind that is both easy enough for students and beginners, yet powerful enough to write real code. It's an innovative way to bring real coding concepts to life and empower the next generation with the skills they need to express their creativity." Apple announced a host of new features and improvements made to iOS and Mac OS X. Not only did they announce that OS X will now be called macOS, but the first version update will be called macOS Sierra. One of the biggest new features of the new OS is support for Siri.
How long before Apple sue MIT, saying they ripped them off with Scratch?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Anybody remember Logo, with all those drawing turtles? I remember my first introduction to recursion was in Logo.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
So that fetuses will pop out already knowing how to code Swift.
Its just in their interest. The more people can code, the less they have to pay them.
"in Apple's chosen language"
Be good little slaves now
Swift features seem to get depreciated so quickly, it's highly likely that it'll be completely obsolete by the time they are grown up
I think they should just learn BASIC (Blastocyst's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code).
Do these terms drive anyone else crazy? How about "computer programmer" or "software developer".
When I think of "coder", I think of some slightly heavy-set guy in Brooklyn with the obligatory beard and thick, black glasses..
They could at least have paid homage to www.code.org - This is reverse "not-invented-here" Apple syndrome...
When will it get back around to Mac OS 7.5.1?
Of all of the new programming languages that are out there, the future looks exceedingly bright for Swift.
The new languages I'm referring to are Go, Rust, Swift and Scala.
The worst of them is Rust. Its problems are numerous, ranging from a single buggy implementation, to awkward semantics, to a limited standard library, to a community that's hyper-focused on codes of conducts and forcing "tolerance" on all, to extreme hype. It doesn't help that it's backed by Mozilla, which a lot of people have their doubts about now that Firefox's market share has been dropping so low. Rust is generally seen with distrust by many.
Go was looking promising for a while. It's backed by Google, and generally has good semantics. It has two implementations, including one built upon GCC. It has a reasonable community, and a large selection of high quality libraries. The language itself is quite primitive, and feels like it never got out of the 1990s, and its semantics and syntax both underwhelm.
Scala was also looking promising for a while, but it ended up being extraordinarily complex, and very slow. Targeting the JVM ended up being a mistake, as it limited the usefulness of Scala for many users. Its community also remained quite small. Scala combined the worst of the Java mindset of unnecessary complexity with the worst aspects of functional programming.
Swift, on the other hand, has everything going for it. It's backed by Apple, and has already seen much use for real applications. It has been continually improving, even if this means some breakage (which isn't a problem even for the least-skilled of developers). Its semantics are superb, and very practical. Its syntax is clean and easy to work with. It's modern and fast. Its standard library is getting better and better. Now that it has been open sourced and is supporting other platforms it is becoming a real winner for lots of programmers.
If we look ahead 10 or 20 years, we'll very likely see Swift being the only one of those four languages seeing any real use. We've already seen Scala pretty much drop out of existence in practice. Go is starting to stagnate. Rust never even got out of the gate to begin with, and likely won't go anywhere in the long run as there are doubts that Mozilla will even be around in a few years (or if they are, they may not be able to fund Rust's development). Swift is the only one that's seeing real growth, and it's the kind of growth that we've seen from mainstays like C++, Java and C#.
Although it's a young language, Swift is already showing that it has the staying power to be the sort of language that's still happily used decades from now.
This is so much malarky I shudder to think what they do to their own kids, if any.
And in the 1800s all schoold had to teach horsemanship, horseshoe making and carpentry.
How about they learn some math, a language or two, and reading ( both reading and analysis/logic of what is being read )?
How about writing skills? ( composition, if keyboard )
History ( NON ADJUSTED ! )?
How about they also get some low-level medical training? ( Red Cross? Civil Defense? )
What about puzzles, poker, and DIY kits?
And - the utter disgrace - how to get along, etiquette, how to follow rule and play games?
You know, like normal kids....
Not a code.org initiative, so I guess those apps won't be Girls Only.
That's nice.
I'm assuming since it's an app it doesn't actually do anything outside of its little box. So the trick will be if it's easy for a kid learning in the Playground to then create a real executable to do whatever they want to their computer.
Hint: Tim Cook is gay. He has no children.
Executives who do have children keep them away from computers. They send them to schools where they do not get iPads, where they do not stare at Swift Playgrounds, where they do not learn to code. That's for other people's children, apparently.
What will "coding" replace in the currently expected education of students coming out of high school? Thirty percent of them admitted to college are unprepared for college courses and end up taking remedial work or flunk out. It could get worse with added course work. I could name any number of studies that probably would get short shrift but readers could figure them out. It's my understanding that in some states like where I live there are a minimum number contact hours required per year in school so if there are weather closures the hours must be made up. In another state I know that if the school bus delivers students to school and they turn around and immediately get back on the bus for a trip home that counts as one of the minimum required attendance school days. Are we going to add hours or school days for coding class?
In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. George Orwell
that's not coding. nor anything even close. at best it's making move things on a screen. more like an adventure game...
I have lost track of how many "teach the great unwashed masses to program/code" initiatives and gimmicks have come out since Logo. Has anyone anywhere actually done a real-world study to see if people subjected to this force-feeding actually becoming credible working programmers, or maybe even developers? And I don't mean a web "developer." I learned to program (many decades ago) because my job required it, I found out I enjoyed it, and I had things that I needed to do with it. Any time I want to learn a new language I wait until I find a project that could actually make use of the new language. Just coding some random thing that someone else thinks is neato-keeno (I said I've been doing this for decades) never taught anyone how to do anything. So, are there some hard studies on which to base throwing more money at this problem?
How long ago was it that apple and microjunk stopped including a programming language within the os? Thats what has harmed coding more than anything else.
Coding, just like money, is for the poor.
Tim Cook described it as "a powerful new way for kids to learn to code,"
Do not let them admire his money or his ways. That dude sucks dicks. Dicks all up in his ass busting nuts all hot and smelly.
Don't even teach them that about him.
Any school that I've ever worked for would not be able to afford macs to do this with. It's Chromebooks all the way.
Abort!!!!
LOL this needs to be +5 funny.
It's sitting at -1 troll. I guess he made someone on the rust moderation team mad.
He never took and was not required to take FORTRAN77 at Auburn in is BS program!
What a lair!
Simple and easy starter stuff? Ideally in a language which is going to stick around? (or the lessons are adaptable in another language)
They won't sue first because it doesn't look or feel like scratch and second because the whole point of it is help kids learn and either would be a success.
Now please says "MacOS Sierra Siri" 5 times fast. I can't believe they went from an easy soft vocalization of "Oh ESS ECHS" to MAK AWS. You don't put a soft word like Sierra after MacOS you need an assonant word like Tomhawk or KillerKlown. Then you change the name of Siri to something like Zika.
Bad move.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Hint: Tim Cook is gay. He has no children.
I don't know about Tim Cook; but I have heard that over 60% of gay men have children (and I would bet the percentage is even higher for gay women).
> I can't believe they went from an easy soft vocalization of "Oh ESS ECHS"
It was never "oh ess echs," it was always "oh ess ten" because the X is a Roman numeral 10.
Seriously, in 15 years you haven't figured that out?