Apple launches coding camps for kids in its retail stores • Hacker News Board

Re: Apple launches coding camps for kids in its retail stores

#91

Post by bitserf » Tue, Jun 21, 2016, 7:29 PM UTC

plg wrote: post #32

I took my kid to one of these last year. It was fairly useless. They drag around little action-icons into a list to make an animated character move around and do stuff. My 11-year-old was bored stiff. Edit: PS the Apple Store employee who ran this thing (he was a very nice guy) admitted he had zero coding experience himself

It will be interesting to see if Swift Playgrounds on iPad changes the landscape here.

Simple intro courses, but it's got real Swift compiler + runtime, and you can call straight into all the native APIs if you jump out of the guided tour.

Re: Apple launches coding camps for kids in its retail stores

#92

Post by rjvir » Tue, Jun 21, 2016, 7:32 PM UTC

I remember going to Apple Camp as a kid (around 2006). At the time, they had different sessions teaching kids how to "edit movies", "make music", "build websites" etc. They were showing us how to use iMovie, GarageBand, and iWeb.

After attending those camps, I so badly wanted a Mac.

Re: Apple launches coding camps for kids in its retail stores

#93

Post by glhaynes » Tue, Jun 21, 2016, 7:37 PM UTC

Michie wrote: post #80

glhaynes wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Swift Playgrounds only runs on the iOS 10 beta and is itself still in a prerelease form.

It's possible that it still runs on iOS 10 beta, but based on their sample templates and what they have used in WWDC16, it's already a fully functional app. Better implementation than Tynker. And it's also a good preview for future coders to use.

Yeah, and it might even be the best choice to use it. I'd guess it would be. But it feels against Apple's "house style" to use unreleased software in that way.

Re: Apple launches coding camps for kids in its retail stores

#94

Post by Razengan » Tue, Jun 21, 2016, 7:38 PM UTC

jshevek wrote: post #59

sxg wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without a GUI, mainstream computing probably wouldn't even exist let alone mainstream programming.

> Without a GUI, mainstream computing probably wouldn't even exist let alone mainstream programming. As a child growing up, learning to function in society by speaking, reading, writing, and generally understanding English was a much harder task for me than learning to program in BASIC. BASIC is simple, predictable, logical and downright easy compared to English. We take learning to read and write for granted, but it…

> Consider those children for whom learning a CLI was prerequisite to playing video games. All of those kids who I knew quickly memorized the requisite commands.

Ah yes, I still figuratively remember all the commands for loading Sinclair Spectrum and Commodore 64 games, and their "FastLoad" variants, typing in those PEEKs and POKEs from magazines for cheating/hacking, then the fiddling with AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS while trying to juggle HIMEM and EMM386 and whatnot to be able to play DOS games..

It definitely piqued my interest in the workings of computers, spurred on by the generally more technically-inclined (not to mention humorous! oh how I miss CRASH and ZZAP!) magazines of the time, and it did get me into programming.

BUT, all that CLI voodoo was just a routine ritual to my other friends, in the way of what they really wanted (games.) They just had all the commands written down, and would rather ask someone than consult a manual when something needed to be done differently. They already had other interests. It didn't make all of them programmers.

So as with everything else, you can't really make a general statement that "X will make children do Y." People who are inclined towards doing something, will do that thing, on their own. I think what we (the adults) should focus on, is making things easier for them after the fact, after they've decided to get into programming.

Let's start with why the major operating systems of today require separate downloads and online research to get started with programming. macOS comes with that Grapher app, Windows comes with Paint, why can't they come with a nice coding app and some tutorials? So kids can just start poking away on their $500+ tablets and computers out of the box, like we used to on the C64, 20 years ago?

Re: Apple launches coding camps for kids in its retail stores

#95

Post by thaumasiotes » Tue, Jun 21, 2016, 7:39 PM UTC

chillacy wrote: post #76

danso wrote: post #14

Ironically, I sometimes fear Apple would be the harbinger of programming's death, what with how much can be done via consumer-friendly app and touch-screens. It didn't help hearing about OSX becoming macOS, which would be well in line with a dystopian future in which the only people who need to know about plaintext and file systems are the full-time Apple programmers. But this sounds like a great initiative...and als…

> dystopian future in which the only people who need to know about plaintext and file systems are the full-time Apple programmers We're heading into a dystopian future where the only people who need to know about manual transmission and fuel injectors are auto mechanics. There are plenty of non technical people who benefit from increased abstraction. I'm personally happy as long as it doesn't impact productivity for…

>> dystopian future in which the only people who need to know about plaintext and file systems are the full-time Apple programmers

> We're heading into a dystopian future where the only people who need to know about manual transmission and fuel injectors are auto mechanics.

To be fair, "auto mechanics" is a wider class than "Ford technicians".

Re: Apple launches coding camps for kids in its retail stores

#96

Post by mythz » Tue, Jun 21, 2016, 7:45 PM UTC

jshevek wrote: post #70

gshulegaard wrote: post #63

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 p…

For me, it has the feeling of being more of a PR stunt than a sincere effort to help education. Plus, its an opportunity to build brand allegiance at a young age. I would rather Apple donate an equal amount of money to any of those entities out there which help to bring technology to the youth.

I don't see this as a PR stunt at all, this goes to one of Apple's core values. Apple's very good at marketing, if this were a PR stunt they would have large brand building ads and little substance, whereas this initiative requires a lot of resources, logistics and investments to run and are offering it for free.

Since Tim took over Apple's been doing a lot more towards "We want to leave the world better than we found it". Eventually I expect it will be good for Apple's bottom line long-term, but this follows their theme (e.g. Swift playgrounds, WWDC Scholarships) of helping teach more kids how to code. Personally I think Apple wants to attract students, because they prefer that demographic. There would be a lot more money to be made going after Enterprise wallets than spending it on free programs for cash-poor students.

Basically under Tim's leadership I'm expecting Apple to invest a lot in: Green Energy, Kids Education, Privacy, Diversity. Not because it's good for their bottom line, but because they think it's the right thing to do.

Re: Apple launches coding camps for kids in its retail stores

#97

Post by jshevek » Tue, Jun 21, 2016, 7:46 PM UTC

sxg wrote: post #87

jshevek wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm responding to the claim that GUIs were probably necessary for coding to become commonplace. They were absolutely not necessary, though they certainly accelerated it. In this context, most of your post seems unrelated to mine.

My argument is that without GUIs, computers would have either never become common or would gain adoption at a substantially slower pace than they have with the general public. With no/slowed adoption of computers, it's not possible for programming to become more common than it is today.

We are likely to use words like "common" and "substantially slower" somewhat differently, given the subjectivity of the terms. However:

> With no/slowed adoption of computers, it's not possible for programming to become more common than it is today.

"Not possible"? That's false on the face of it. You appear to be making unwarranted assumptions about what is possible in the relationship between (a) the amount of 'computing' in today's world and (b) the number of people who program.

The only non-cultural factor which really limits the possibility of coding is the availability of machines on which to program. I believe there were only around 20 million devs worldwide at the beginning of 2014. More PCs were shipped in the mid 80s in the US alone.

It is absolutely possible that a world in which the GUI was never invented could have more coders coding than a world in which the GUI had been invented. And the reverse is also true, of course.

Re: Apple launches coding camps for kids in its retail stores

#98

Post by schoen » Tue, Jun 21, 2016, 7:47 PM UTC

schoen wrote: post #26

rm_-rf_slash wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the invention of the GUI killed the dream of mainstream programming. If computers had to be interacted with in ways that resembled programming - like a UNIX prompt - then people would be more used to the way computers actually work, with functions and parameters instead of icons and settings menus. I really hope that raspberry PI gets more mainstream appeal as time goes on. I fear the separation between coder…

I believe as you do and in basically the same terms, but, having had forms of this discussion for much of my life, I've encountered a counterargument that I thought I'd bring up as a devil's advocate: > the way computers actually work, with functions and parameters instead of icons and settings menus Isn't "the way computers actually work" at a fundamental level about electrical engineering, or at least about machine…

I got a ton of upvotes on this, but nobody has replied to it! I wonder how many people who upvoted me noticed that I claimed to be expressing an argument against my own opinion. :-)

Re: Apple launches coding camps for kids in its retail stores

#99

Post by nickmain » Tue, Jun 21, 2016, 7:50 PM UTC

Longhanks wrote: post #71

rsfinn wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps you haven't heard about Pythonista, which is a full Python programming environment available on the App Store. Now there's also Playgrounds, which is a Swift programming environment that comes with the iOS 10 beta and runs on the iPad (you can even invoke iOS frameworks, apparently) — yes, this is from Apple itself, and yes, they're bending their own rules. But your original statement is not strictly true.

In what way are they bending their own rules? The application comes with it's own Swift compiler and exposes only the public APIs. Nothing Pythonista couldn't do already.

Pythonista cannot open code from other apps so all code has to originate in the app (other than copy-paste).

Swift Playgrounds can round-trip with XCode.

Re: Apple launches coding camps for kids in its retail stores

#100

Post by CPLX » Tue, Jun 21, 2016, 7:56 PM UTC

mythz wrote: post #96

jshevek wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me, it has the feeling of being more of a PR stunt than a sincere effort to help education. Plus, its an opportunity to build brand allegiance at a young age. I would rather Apple donate an equal amount of money to any of those entities out there which help to bring technology to the youth.

I don't see this as a PR stunt at all, this goes to one of Apple's core values. Apple's very good at marketing, if this were a PR stunt they would have large brand building ads and little substance, whereas this initiative requires a lot of resources, logistics and investments to run and are offering it for free. Since Tim took over Apple's been doing a lot more towards "We want to leave the world better than we foun…

Perhaps add privacy to that list as well. Hopefully.