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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."
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.
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.
If you want a more practical suggestion... the skills necessary for the occupation of Walmart greeter.
Yes. Mining the uncanny ability to morph from delivering a pleasant greeting to fascist receipt checker, in the span of one quick shopping trip... since the pay allows one to subsist at below the poverty level, identifying those sociopaths at an early age is critical to their proper recruitment.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
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!
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"
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.
I have never, ever, encountered a greeter at Walmart who morphed into a receipt-checker.
You must go to one of the shitty WalMarts.
It's not the code at Apple, it's the development environment. You could throw the best 'coders' in the world against that wall.
It's about teaching how to use Swift . . . a "programming" language that is a proprietary technology that belongs to Apple.
Uh...No.
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."
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?
If you've never seen a greeter check your receipt, you must have never bought anything at Walmart that is bigger than a plastic carry bag, such as the sort of computer on which one runs a Swift compiler.
I've bought four or five laptops at WalMart. A desktop. Four or five tablets.
My local Walmart is in a small midwestern town. I've been to a number of bigger-city WalMarts, but I didn't hang around the front door where the greeter works long enough to witness bag checking.
It just isn't worth it to build a Hackintosh simply to run a Swift compiler on.
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.
Wow, since when does Ubuntu only run on Mac? I know people are worried that the Windows Subsystem for Linux would kill Linux, but I'm impressed Apple managed to do it quietly without anyone noticing, requiring a Mac to run Linux.
Last I checked, any modern PC can run Linux and thus, Ubuntu and I'm sure various flavors thereof. It even says they mention Ubuntu as that's what they tested on - likely other distributions of Linux work as well.
They aren't even .deb files, they're tarballs.
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.
Why not teach them to be lawyers?
Already too many. That's not an anti-lawyer crack, just that there WAS a huge push for more lawyers, law schools churned out new graduates, and now the profession is over-saturated.
or medicine?
Too expensive.
or accounting?
How many accountants do you need?
Only a small minority of kids will go on to be programmers. The majority won't go anywhere near it.
Maybe not, but a familiarity with the concepts will benefit you a lot more than simply as a bath towards an entry level coding job. More and more non-technical jobs are being eliminated. The law and doctors are positions unlikely to be that affected (robot surgeons not withstanding), though accountants could be on the chopping block. Or at least, technology that reduces the job of three accountants to one.
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."
Where do I find the source tarball? I run NetBSD and swift clearly needs to be incorporated into pkgsrc.
Or can you only get a binary blob? A development tool that is a binary blob? Get serious. Somebody should be working on making it so the swift compiler and the entire toolchain can be compiled using swift.
Whoops. I stand corrected. The source code for Swift is here. Looks like it sits on top of Java.