A Year of Teaching Swift
I have taught a range of programming languages over the years. Primarily Visual Basic, Ruby and Python. I liked Ruby the best so far and hated Python for its crazily inconsistent library programming.
Swift is the closest thing to Ruby I’ve used. It is very consistent and predictable in its syntax and mostly makes sense as you read it.
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In the Learn to Code curriculum, I found that everyone got something working. The difference between the stronger students and the weaker students then was more to do with evaluations of the complexity of their solution, the understandability and style of their solutions or other factors like memory and time efficiency.
I have never really had these kinds of conversations in classes at this level before.
Apple today announced that Swift Playgrounds, its educational coding app for iPad, will offer an exciting new way to learn to code using robots, drones and musical instruments. Swift Playgrounds is perfect for students and beginners learning to code with Swift, Apple’s powerful and intuitive programming language for building world-class apps. Apple is working with leading device makers to make it easy to connect to Bluetooth-enabled robots within the Swift Playgrounds app, allowing kids to program and control popular devices, including LEGO MINDSTORMS Education EV3, the Sphero SPRK+, Parrot drones and more. The Swift Playgrounds 1.5 update will be available as a free download on the App Store beginning Monday, June 5.
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Swift is C++ with rounded corners, and the only reason I won’t say that teaching C++ to kids should be prosecuted as child abuse is that Spiers is an actual teacher, so it wouldn’t be cool. It’s still not funny though. Papert was right, while C weenies would make slaves of us all. #thoughtcrime
