Apple launches coding camps for kids in its retail stores

There has always been things like Codea as well, for a long time now:

[1] http://twolivesleft.com/Codea/

I am pretty surprised by the general lack luster comments bordering on negativity here. Personally, I think it is great to see a major retailer take even a misguided stab at improving child tech education which has quickly fallen behind demand (in America).

Do I think the approach is more than a little bit wrong? Sure, GUI programming a non-useful task wouldn't be my choice.

Would I prefer a more robust longer-term program? Absolutely.

Does this fall well short of actually being useful/addressing the original problem? More than likely.

But despite of all that, I would much rather have Apple try this and hopefully improve on the offering pending demonstrated interest than not have it at all.

In my experience, 8 year olds often ask more penetrating questions than adults. If they take an interest in understanding something, they often desire to understand it on the deepest level possible for them - quickly exceeding the capacity of their parent or teacher to explain (unless the adult is a 'renaissance person'). (Edit: or a competent teacher with adequate training relevant to the subject)

If the 8 year olds are really encouraged to explore and ask questions (vs 'jump through these hoops, follow instructions), the staff at apple will most likely be unable to answer their questions.

Of course there are upsides for Apple. Otherwise they couldn't do it (even if Tim wanted it, the stakeholders have the final saying). But I'm not really worried about that a lot. Sure, people will learn how great it is to program with Apple, and how easy you can do certain things in the playground sandbox (that's where you will code on your iPad. You give the program simple instructions such as move or draw an object in Swift but the heavy lifting is done by Apple's GUI Frameworks).

But as the kids grow older (and hopefully become more interested in programing), they will also learn the limitations of the playground. And this is where they will start looking in other alternatives. They might explore proper iOS development but at some point, but eventually they will have to deal with other platforms or programing languages. Some will probably stick to iOS, and the soon-to-be programers will prefer iOS because they have more knowledge in iOS programming but in general, there will be more programers for all languages.

I started programing about 6 or 7 years ago when I was 12 or 13. When I first started programing, I loved the PHP IDE I was using on my first windows laptop – it was so helpful and offered so many helpful functions and I was soon locked into it. At that time, I couldn't think about using another editor or os. But as I grew more passionate about programming (and started to see the limitations of PHP), I started using other languages, and I had to explore other editors. Long story short, right know, I'm mostly using VIM (although I would not call myself an VIM export – I just loving using it and because it is so quick, lightweight, modular and works everywhere). I prefer developing on Mac but last month I used Linux (Fedora) for over a month and enjoyed it. There was nothing I couldn't do on Fedora but I'm glad to be back on macOS again (I just prefer the platform as a whole and their integration with my other devices).

What I'm saying is that it doesn't really matter if you are locked into one language as long as you you are curious about things (which children generally are). You will soon discover that there are many things that are sometimes greater or just fun to use. Those things will not go away. I don't see many Swift webservers anytime soon and there will always be a need to use other languages. At some point, those kid will realize that their iPad is not sufficient and will switch to a PC. This path is certain better then scare kids away especially because many kids need immediate feedback when they type something (and "hello world" on a console won't cut it).

That seems like a bit of a red herring. What does blocking the downloading of code have to do with offering coding camps?

Regardless, I don't think the kids need to worry about that until they offer the Corporate Strategems Bootcamp. Until then, pretty sure if the kids want to create apps that download executable code, they can install them on their device directly with xcode.