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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.
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.
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
Compared to what? Microsoft's C#? Oracle's Java?
But they're getting introduced to the basic concepts of how computers work. Loops, if/else, variables, etc.
They see the character on the screen being a total dumbass that only does exactly as its told, like a computer.
The only thing they need to remember is that last part: "Computers are dumb, remember that when using a computer."
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?