SwiftUI for Teaching App Development
I was, like many iOS developers, shocked last week when SwiftUI was announced at WWDC 2019).
Read MoreI was, like many iOS developers, shocked last week when SwiftUI was announced at WWDC 2019).
Read MoreMy school district just finished our school year and now that I have had a couple of days to review and reflect upon the fantastic year my students and I had learning Swift I am left with one major thought: creativity was the key to motivating my students to continue to want to learn more Swift and to keep coding.
Read MoreI recently attended EdCamp Cleveland and during a session on coding in the classroom an exasperated primary grade teacher (I think she said 3rd grade) said "Does all of this block coding really lead to anything?
Read MoreMy 12th grade students and I recently completed our most fun and enjoyable lesson of the year in the Intro to App Development with Swift course: Lesson 13 - Question Bot. This was my students' first opportunity to create an app than did much more than show a single view of a picture or something similar...
Read MoreI have been using Swift Playgrounds and App Development with Swift (Teacher) (Student) - which I call the Swift Playground learning tools because they both use Swift Playgrounds - to teach basic computer programming concepts and coding in the Swift language for almost 6 months. I have recently started to think about the effectiveness of the Swift learning tools.
Read MoreOne of the most satisfying and rewarding parts of being a teacher is seeing your students grasp a concept, internalize the material, and then use or expand upon the concept in their work. The greatest part of teaching coding is that I get to see the results of my students learning right away when they are coding.
Read MoreThe lessons in this section of the curriculum is focused on showing students the history of programming environments and the current Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for the Mac: Xcode.
Read MoreWe had an outstanding day learning about parameters and coding to solve the puzzle lessons in Apple's Learn to Code 2 Swift playgrounds this week. I was excited to teach these lessons because I remember how powerful and helpful I found parameters to be in writing concise code when I was learning to code.
Read MoreSwift Playgrounds for iOS and Mac offer not just a new way to teach coding with fun puzzles and beautiful graphics, they offer us a completely new approach to teaching coding. Most courses I have seen (including my own) start with some kind of introduction to variables and constants. There has to be a way to assign a value to something so that we can demonstrate how to take a value and perform some kind of operation or action with it. While this approach can be appropriate for older students who can handle abstract thinking (think students have are taking or have taken algebra), it would most likely be confusing to most younger students who are still in the concrete thinking phase...
Read MoreI was at a conference last July, and one of the other coding teachers said that in order for him to teach coding using Swift in his country (Poland) that he would have to justify, " Why Swift?" Initially I thought, "Well, why not? Apple has created this new language. They make great hardware and software for us to use when we teach." Now that I have had some time to reflect upon that simple, but powerful question, I think that I have a much better, more well-reasoned answer.
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