Apple Introduces Swift Playgrounds App To Teach Kids To Code (theverge.com) 73
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.
Yay (Score:1)
How long before Apple sue MIT, saying they ripped them off with Scratch?
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The future looks extremely bright for Swift. (Score:1, Interesting)
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
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Either a trolling attempt or display of genuine stupidity. My theory is that both are correct and you are a genuinely stupid troll.
Re: RUST CODE OF CONDUCT VIOLATION DETECTED (Score:1)
LOL this needs to be +5 funny.
It's sitting at -1 troll. I guess he made someone on the rust moderation team mad.
Sibilant alliteration versus assonant accentuation (Score:2)
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.
Logo (Score:5, Interesting)
Anybody remember Logo, with all those drawing turtles? I remember my first introduction to recursion was in Logo.
Re:Logo (Score:4, Interesting)
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You call yourself poor? My family was so poor I had to take the bus to the public library to read a book about what it would be like to own a computer with Logo. I'm completely serious about this.
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Bus? Luxury!
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Re:Logo (Score:5, Funny)
My library only had two books about computers. They were titled "Zero" and "One".
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Anybody remember Logo, with all those drawing turtles?
I do remember Logo. I remember in the second grade that we'd file into the computer lab, the teacher would speak commands we would type into computer and the turtle would draw an object. Then once in a while a kid would screw up, and the turtle would fill the screen with lines, and we'd all find it funny. I'm pretty sure that the teachers had no idea what the different commands did, and no one ever mentioned it outside of class. Then when we went to the third grade no one mentioned it again.
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Next year Apple will release Prenatal Playgrounds (Score:3, Funny)
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Its just in their interest. The more people can code, the less they have to pay them.
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Compared to what? Microsoft's C#? Oracle's Java?
Teaching Swift to childern (Score:3, Insightful)
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
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No it's much worse than that. By the time these kids grow up, every coding job will be outsourced to Africa.
Those will be the only respectable jobs that former Nigerian scammers can get in the future.
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And so was anything available when I was growing up. TI-BASIC isn't something I use ever these days but it taught me the basics of loops and the like.
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TI99/4? Amateurs! I had a Timex Sinclair that was so slow it couldn't handle a keypress and display output at the same time. Every time you hit a key the screen would go blank until you lifted your finger.
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It's not about learning to code. This is another Apple attempt to indoctrinate children into the Apple egosphere. They did it with the Apple II back when I was in elementary school. Thankfully, I had machine at home that was far superior. A TI99/4a.
That was a joke, right?
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Computer programmers are nerds. Software developers are college educated nerds. Nerds are losers. Coders are millionaire rockstars who GitHub for Uber, bro. Coders are cool social winners.
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I think you're missing something like "CODERS make APPS!" in there.
Hour of Code Rip-off (Score:1)
They could at least have paid homage to www.code.org - This is reverse "not-invented-here" Apple syndrome...
all students in all schools.... yeah, right (Score:1)
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 utte
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Hint: Tim Cook is gay. He has no children.
Executives who do have children keep them away from computers [nytimes.com]. 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.
How easy is it to jump to real programming? (Score:2)
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From http://www.apple.com/swift/pla... [apple.com]:
"Because youâ(TM)re working with real code, you can import and export directly between Swift Playgrounds and Xcode. So you can try out your ideas with the tool pros use to develop iOS and Mac apps."
So it looks like there is a path to a more sophisticated dev environment if you outgrow the iPad sandbox.
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From http://www.apple.com/swift/pla... [apple.com]: "Because youâ(TM)re working with real code, you can import and export directly between Swift Playgrounds and Xcode. So you can try out your ideas with the tool pros use to develop iOS and Mac apps."
So it looks like there is a path to a more sophisticated dev environment if you outgrow the iPad sandbox.
Now that's cool!
And they didn't even mention it.
What will be deleted from study? (Score:2)
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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."
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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."
Well, if I were a kid, I think I would find it a lot more engaging than the typical first (well, second (not counting "10 GOTO 10") BASIC program output back in the day:
1
12
123
1234
12345
123456
1234567
123456789
Do Any of these Work? (Score:4, Interesting)
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Learning coding is not about coding exactly, but about learning a process that can help us understand the world around. The logic that is applied to language and mathematics helped us see the world as a structure. That structural understanding got us out of the woods and into the modernity. Like reading/writing/math, coding is pre-discursive; the knowledge and discoveries that can be exchanged come after.
The world is increasingly becoming technologically driven so it follows a normalization process to be ab
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Let me ask a related but narrower question: How long ago was it that Apple and Microsoft stopped including a programming language within the operating system that is capable of reading and writing files chosen by the user, other than by copying and pasting between a text editor and the browser?
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Apple used to include XCode on the DVD (or CD set) that came with their computers. Today, it's on the app store instead, and is free. You would only have to pay to get your app included on the app store. To program for yourself, on the Mac, is free.
Microsoft makes a free version of Visual Studio, but it's rather limited. You can download it.
Of course, neither of these is actually *included* within the OS in terms of being there by default, pre-installed, on every new computer. If that's what you meant,
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Apple never did stop including such a language. Python is bundled with the OS.
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Apple never did stop including such a language. Python is bundled with the OS.
Actually, the list is a lot more extensive [superuser.com]...
And that doesn't include AppleScript and JavaScript, which are target-able in XCode. Even without XCode, AppleScript even has an IDE of sorts (AppleScript Editor).
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It's an iPad app.
There are a surprising number of schools here in the UK where the children are expected to own an iPad. Apple offers heavy discounts for educational use and easy payment terms.
Is there anything like this for Windows? (Score:2)
Simple and easy starter stuff? Ideally in a language which is going to stick around? (or the lessons are adaptable in another language)