Slashdot Mirror
Apple Trains Chicago Teachers To Put Coding In More Classrooms (engadget.com)
Apple has unveiled a partnership with Northwestern University and public schools to help teachers bring programming and other forms of computer science into Chicago-area classrooms. "The trio will set up a learning hub at Lane Tech College Prep High School that will introduce high school teachers to Apple's Everyone Can Code curriculum," reports Engadget. "They'll also have the option to train in an App Development with Swift course to boost the number of high school-oriented computer science teachers. Teachers will also have options for in-school coaching and mentorship to make sure they're comfortable with the curriculum when they're in front of actual students."
First teach them not to eat detergent pods. Then work your way up to coding from there.
Which is actually true as long as a good outcome is not required. The results will be about as bad as with the coding though.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
ook okk eek eekek aakka ookkk!!!
Why not teach them to be lawyers? or medicine? or accounting? Only a small minority of kids will go on to be programmers. The majority won't go anywhere near it.
Call it what it is: Advertising for tech companies to influence young minds. And kool aid for idiot school officials.
If you teach them anything extra how about a little law? Many will be screwed via contract or go into business. Some will be sued or sue. Far more useful than Apple advertisements in the classroom.
Need more GUNS in classrooms! Hurry! Before the next kid with a carbine takes out more KIDS! Do you want more KIDS to DIE? Then MORE GUNS is the only solution. And it's the REPUBLICAN thing to do --- with GOD is on OUR SIDE, we can ONLY WIN!
I went to a sock-hop at Lane Tech and Styx was the band. I didn't go there, but I dated a girl who went to Immaculata and she liked Styx, so she insisted. This is when Styx was still just a local Chicago band. I wouldn't have gone, but she was a freak.
12/10, would endure Lady again.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Brainwashing them young is the only way Swift will survive.
or ... Apple attempts to fend off golang
The real title should be "Apple Trains Beauhd To Put Apple Propaganda in More Slashdot Stories"
Actually . . . if you just slightly scratch the surface of this story, you'll see that it's not about teaching programming.
It's about teaching how to use Swift . . . a "programming" language that is a proprietary technology that belongs to Apple.
A programming course would have used something open and simple . . . like Python. Apple just wants to push Swift in this move.
Using a language owned by one vendor . . . kinda sorta puts you at the mercy of that vendor. Apple could easily, willy-nilly declare, "The Swift Programming Language cannot be used by Left-Handed Programmers!"
Just to be fair . . . I feel the same way about the "Go" language.
If there is one thing that we should have learned in the last 30 years, is that open languages, like C, Java and Python are very successful, because they run everywhere, which causes everyone to write in it, which causes libraries to written for whatever you need to do.
Proprietary languages never have a chance of achieving that.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
. Teachers will also have options for in-school coaching and mentorship to make sure they're comfortable with the curriculum when they're in front of actual students.
Even if you grant that shoving coding down everyone's throat is a good idea (it's probably not... understanding tech probably is, but coding probably not), you can't just magically make teachers competent coders.
Becoming a good coder - the kind you want to be teaching others - takes many years of real world experience. It takes a good understanding of algorithms, time complexities, and machine architectures. It takes the sweat equity of having made the mistakes, seen why some things are good ideas and others are bad. It takes understanding why elegant designs and good architecture beat spaghetti code patched up to kinda work. It takes an analytical, rigorous mindset.
There are brilliant coders in industry and miserably bad ones who do more damage than good, and the later sometimes has just as much experience as the former, so you can't automatically assume time spent is a good indicator either.
Instead of teaching coding (in this case, code for "vendor mindshare"), let's instead teach people how tech works. Let's teach them where there data is, who controls it, how not to become subservient to "big tech". Let's teach them about online safety. About how to make decisions that vote for socially responsible tech instead of Facebook and other "you are the product" shit. Let's teach them about vendor lock-in, and how to decide if it's a good idea in any given circumstance or not.
There's a lot we could do that'd serve kids better than this. Let's teach them to be well informed citizens of an increasingly digital world, not legions of 3rd-rate coders suffering from Dunning-Kruger because they took a class once.
programmers cheaper. Same with Google and Facebook. Why train workers yourself when you can the public to throw money at it for you?
More teachers don't help with test scores.
More cash did not help bring parts of the USA to some new educational level.
Code and new computer devices don't improve grades every generation.
All this support of computers got attempted over decades. The low test results stay the same.
Teach the in poor areas students math and science. English.
Use tests and exams to sort who should get a full scholarship to one of the very best colleges in the USA.
On merit so only the very best students who can study get a full scholarship.
Arts, biology, medicine, law. Work out what the community wants to see their best students learn.
Computer "work" may not resonate with some communities in the USA with students who want and can learn.
Medicine and law can be seen as the real pathway to a good wage.
To some communities "computer" work is a computer shop selling computers. It has no value in the community as a worthwhile job for the best students.
Stop making all students do something their community sees as a pathway to a below average job.
Stop spending more on "computers" and see if the community wants more support for getting students into law and medicine for their very best students.
For the rest offer support to get into a great number of vocational schools.
Sport, art, music, languages, math, science. Stop expecting "computers" to magically fix every "gap" in education every decade.
The only winners with "computers" is the brand that sells the computer and the sale of support coursework, robot kits.
Try talking with the local community, see what they want for their best students who can learn.
Support the rest of the students with coursework that actually interest them.
Big brand computers for decades did not make poor areas any better educated.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
can fix the hot mess that is apple shitty bug ridden software?
Most of these teachers will do the CPD, learn how to teach a little bit of Apple's coding curriculum, and say they're happy and have learned a lot from it. Only a few will go on to incorporate it into their classes (Apple's curriculum isn't on the Common Core, after all). Those teachers that do dedicate some of their own and their students' time to teaching the curriculum will have to divert their time from elsewhere on the compulsory curriculum. Some core concepts and skills will inevitably bet less attention and, as a result, shallower learning. Whether this shows up in any test scores or not depends on how far the teacher and students went and whether they could compensate for the lost time. There'll probably be no discernible drop in test scores but there won't be any gain either. The reason: Programming/writing code is an entirely non-transferable skill. Again, most teachers, whatever they say in feedback and press releases, will be smart enough to stick to developing their students' literacy, numeracy, and study skills and covering the state mandated curricula to make sure that their students perform well academically.
Debate is a form of harassment. Do not question my truth.
Indeed.
Hey, don't laugh.
That could be a big sales point in the US education market.
Ios coding is better the no coding, I guess
Tim Cock's Swift is an abomination that's more retarded than Python.
It's about teaching how to use Swift . . . a "programming" language that is a proprietary technology that belongs to Apple.
Uh...No.
did you scroll down to the bottom?
Copyright © 2018 Apple Inc. All rights reserved.
Swift and the Swift logo are trademarks of Apple Inc.
Sounds like Uh Yes
proprietary technology that belongs to Apple.
What's your next guess?
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
The web pages, not the language. Swift is an open-source project. You can check it out of the repository, build it yourself, modify it, etc, etc.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
What sort of idiot would want to do that? It's a proprietary language, designed to serve specific purpose - simplify Objective-C for retards.
A little more detail ie "On December 3, 2015, the Swift language, supporting libraries, debugger, and package manager were published under the Apache 2.0 license with a Runtime Library Exception, and Swift.org was created to host the project." https://swift.org/about/ and of course https://swift.org/LICENSE.txt and not to forget https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.... So it seems Apple could not sell swift and after having trained all of it's coders, it decided to open source it to save the cost of retraining it's coders and of course to bring in new coders. Quite the scheme but when you have tens of thousand of coders, that hundreds of millions of cost.
All the major tech companies are the same pack of bean counter dicks, real arseholes. Instead of coming togethor to create an open generic program langauge that codes in two ways, verbose and compact and that translates well in the verbose form, the endlessly fuck with this bullshit to push their profit margins and fuck everyone else on the plant, a board of tiny dicks, blocking this from happening and governments or more accurately politicians not giving a fuck as long as they get campaign dollars.
Seriously after over half a century of computer language, no generic open teaching language. Thank fuck these arseholes were not in charge of normal language, we would all have to own multiple dictionaries and translators for tens of thousands of languages and pay licenses and patent fees, to talk or write.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
I thought all the articles making the "tailor Swift" pun mentioned that Apple distributes the reference implementation of Swift under the Apache License 2.0. If a work is distributed as free software under that license, it isn't "proprietary software" by the FSF's definition. What definition of "proprietary" are you using?
You can check it out of the repository, build it yourself, modify it, etc, etc.
Very few high school students will be able to do any of that. In the real world, Swift is used for the following purposes:
1. Writing apps for Apple devices running MacOS or iOS.
It is not an appropriate choice for a first language taught in a public school. These students should be learning Python or Scratch. Even JavaScript would be more appropriate than Swift, and is used by Khan Academy's programming tutorials.
Swift is open source since nearly a decade and compiles to any majour platforms.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Again, what kind of idiot would want to use that which was specifically tailored as an Objective-C with substitute for anything else.
Maybe its because apple talk like its theirs and people dont trust apple
It's "open source" in the same way C# is. Okay, yes, you could run it on any platform you want, but realistically it's tied to Apple and the only place it's ever used is within the Apple ecosystem. There's probably some fringe project where some idiot made a Linux project out of it, but by and large it will never be used outside of Apple land.
Swift may be FOSS but it is geared towards Apple.
Why not something more relevant like Java/Javascript/Python or Rust?
Why do you object to kids learning marketable skills?
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Maybe because by the time these kids are out looking for jobs apple will be more irrelevant then it currently is and they will have wasted their time learning a dead language. Its more beneficial to teach them Latin.
Typical jcr. A moron 15 years ago, still a moron today...
https://swift.org/community/#communication :
Community Structure
Advancing the Swift programming language with a coherent, clear view of its evolution requires strong leadership. The leadership is taken from the community, and works closely with the much broader group of contributors and users. Roles within the community include:
Project lead appoints technical leaders from the community. Apple Inc. is the project lead, and interacts with the community through its representative.
Core team is the small group of engineers responsible for strategic direction
Code owner is the individual responsible for a specific area of the Swift codebase
Committer is anyone that has commit access to the Swift code base
Contributor is anyone that contributes a patch or helps with code review