Apple brings coding to the iPad with Swift Playground
Introduced as a new way for children to learn how to code, Apple will bring its Swift programming language to iPad with Swift Playground, a touch-friendly way for beginners to grasp the basics.
In an onstage demonstration, Apple showed how it plans to "engage and motivate learners" with a series of lessons on how to write for Swift. Users learn the basics of programming by moving an onscreen character with code, solving puzzles and accomplishing goals in a game-like scenario.
When using Swift Playground, commands appear at the bottom like QuickType suggestions intended for code. In an onstage demonstration, Apple showed how users could move a character and pick up gems in a simplified way to teach the basics of code.
Advanced coding is also available in Swift Playground, with one demo called "Physics Emoji" showing a creation where emojis move on the screen based on code that modifies virtual gravity on the screen.
Apple also created an all-new coding keyboard for Swift Playground, offering easy access to the letters and symbols coders are most likely to use.
Swift Playground will ship this fall with iOS 10, available in the iOS App Store. The free app will be available to test in the developer beta, starting today, and the public beta set to launch in July.
In an onstage demonstration, Apple showed how it plans to "engage and motivate learners" with a series of lessons on how to write for Swift. Users learn the basics of programming by moving an onscreen character with code, solving puzzles and accomplishing goals in a game-like scenario.
When using Swift Playground, commands appear at the bottom like QuickType suggestions intended for code. In an onstage demonstration, Apple showed how users could move a character and pick up gems in a simplified way to teach the basics of code.
Advanced coding is also available in Swift Playground, with one demo called "Physics Emoji" showing a creation where emojis move on the screen based on code that modifies virtual gravity on the screen.
Apple also created an all-new coding keyboard for Swift Playground, offering easy access to the letters and symbols coders are most likely to use.
Swift Playground will ship this fall with iOS 10, available in the iOS App Store. The free app will be available to test in the developer beta, starting today, and the public beta set to launch in July.
Comments
how and why on earth you would be comparing it to Xcode is a mystery.
On a side note... is she possibly the coolest official apple employee to date?
And by by the way, that was absolutely no pun intended. "To date" as in, "so far". I thought she was really cool. But someone obviously disagrees with me strongly, it seems.
Wow! It's a teaching tool! It teaches you that these built-in functions do as they were designed to do. Perhaps she should have shown the code complexity behind the methods? Yes, she should have done so.
Tim proclaiming it to be free was sad and something Steve never would have noted. He would have just said, ``All these examples are included in your developer kit.''
I wrote a few text games in BASIC on my dad's NorthStar Horizon. It will be nice to tinker on my iPad Amateur and see if I'm interesting in delving deeper.
Not very clear if this is just a coding 101 education app, or if it has any aspiration towards equivalence to Playgrounds on the Mac.
The world isn't lacking guitar enthusiasts or programmers. It's lacking visionary talent that no amount of 3 bar chord Smoke on the Water training will ever teach.
That's the whole point -- it will get them started. What language did you start to learn coding with?
BTW, I'm old too (but not jaded) -- I first learned to code before they had any language but the specific machine language for a particular computer -- octal absolute on the IBM 650, in my case. A real breakthrough was IBM 650 SOAP (Symbolic Optimal Assembly Program). You could use mnemonic Symbols for the Instruction (instead of the octal) and the Assembler would store the instructions and data in an Optimal memory location to compensate for the latency of the drum memory.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_650
... Let''s see now, if the Indians (currently called Native Americans) were paid $24 for Manhattan island in 1626 -- how much would that be worth today at 5% interest compounded annually ...