Finding a Swift Easter Egg
Earlier this school year, my 12th grade students and I were doing section 4: "Hello World" in the App Development with Swift (Teacher) (Student) curriculum. The 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. The lessons do a great job of slowly walking through how to personalize the settings in Xcode. Additionally, students are shown how to use the different panes (areas) in the Xcode window to help them make the most of their time in Xcode. This is accomplished by specifically showing students the sidebar, the console, and logging statements. All of the previously mentioned features were very helpful for my students and now all have their Macs personalized so that they can solve problems and debug their code as efficiently as they are able to do so. However, the best and most enjoyable part of the lesson for my students and me was the easter egg) the engineer(s) that wrote this playground left for us.
It is the little touches of "whimsy" that add anticipation and fun to the lessons which help to provide some extra motivation for my students to work hard on their coding lessons so that they might find a hidden resource that is somehow revealed in the playground.