Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Learning to code as a 30-year-old kid with Apple’s Swift Playgrounds

arstechnica.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 73 posts

Re: Learning to code as a 30-year-old kid with Apple’s Swift Playgrounds

#31

Post by thoughtsimple »

emmiechang wrote: post #16

We play tested this with 10 year olds at the San Francisco Public Library recently and the kids LOVED it -- keep in mind, these were not middle or upper middle class privileged kids, but lower income at risk ones. The challenge is that after about 45 min of "play" time, they want to 'build' something and create--and Playgrounds doesn't provide the environment to do that. Then, they get bored and feel encumbered. Afte…

I think you need to dig deeper into Swift Playgrounds. The iPad user can definitely start their own playground outside of the preprogrammed ones provided by Apple.

In addition, you as a developer can create additional playgrounds in Xcode and transfer them to Swift Playgrounds on the iPad. That means you can give the kids a basic template and allow them to fill in the code. For example, create a template with a couple of pages with the imports already complete and a basic template of empty procedures to get them started.

Re: Learning to code as a 30-year-old kid with Apple’s Swift Playgrounds

#32

Post by atom-morgan »

emmiechang wrote: post #16

We play tested this with 10 year olds at the San Francisco Public Library recently and the kids LOVED it -- keep in mind, these were not middle or upper middle class privileged kids, but lower income at risk ones. The challenge is that after about 45 min of "play" time, they want to 'build' something and create--and Playgrounds doesn't provide the environment to do that. Then, they get bored and feel encumbered. Afte…

Do you have a link to Scratch? I'm having trouble finding it.

Re: Learning to code as a 30-year-old kid with Apple’s Swift Playgrounds

#33

Post by atom-morgan »

mikestew wrote: post #5
madcow2011 wrote: post #4

I've been looking for something similar to this for my 12-year old son. Are there any other resources you guys can recommend to help teach coding? (that aren't Apple-product dependent?)

You've been looking for something similar, discovered that this "something similar" exists, yet the Apple logo puts you off? A used iPad that can run this is probably a couple hundred dollars. Now, perhaps I've misinterpreted your question, and you'd just like a list of alternatives to keep your options open. I've not looked really hard, not having any kids and all, but there seems to be a dearth of options that meet…

Maybe they want to use existing hardware?

Re: Learning to code as a 30-year-old kid with Apple’s Swift Playgrounds

#34

Post by [deleted] »

mikestew wrote: post #5
madcow2011 wrote: post #4

I've been looking for something similar to this for my 12-year old son. Are there any other resources you guys can recommend to help teach coding? (that aren't Apple-product dependent?)

You've been looking for something similar, discovered that this "something similar" exists, yet the Apple logo puts you off? A used iPad that can run this is probably a couple hundred dollars. Now, perhaps I've misinterpreted your question, and you'd just like a list of alternatives to keep your options open. I've not looked really hard, not having any kids and all, but there seems to be a dearth of options that meet…

[deleted]

Re: Learning to code as a 30-year-old kid with Apple’s Swift Playgrounds

#35

Post by narrowrail »

atom-morgan wrote: post #32
emmiechang wrote: post #16

We play tested this with 10 year olds at the San Francisco Public Library recently and the kids LOVED it -- keep in mind, these were not middle or upper middle class privileged kids, but lower income at risk ones. The challenge is that after about 45 min of "play" time, they want to 'build' something and create--and Playgrounds doesn't provide the environment to do that. Then, they get bored and feel encumbered. Afte…

Do you have a link to Scratch? I'm having trouble finding it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scratch_%28programming_languag...

Re: Learning to code as a 30-year-old kid with Apple’s Swift Playgrounds

#36

Post by eschaton »

Watabou wrote: post #19
spraak wrote: post #13

I am not (yet) familiar with this app, but I do like to suggest to any new (young or old) programmers to give Racket along with the book 'Realm of Racket' a try. It's a simple enough programming language to get a good foundation with important principles, but also can take you nearly as far as you want. Edit: For those who downvoted my comment here, I'd really be curious to know why.

Maybe I'm wrong, but I don't think starting out with parenthesis based programming language is the best starting point for new programmers. You'll probably just scare them. I'm saying this with my huge love for Scheme. Of course, if you're already programming and want to learn/try something different, Haskell or Racket, or any other functional language is a great option. What makes Swift Playground so compelling is t…

In my experience, people expect programming languages to look different than human languages (and maybe more like math) and thus aren't put off by whatever structure the one they're learning takes.

It's after people have gotten used to a few languages that they start to develop syntactic prejudices, for example against "parenthesis languages" if they've been doing a lot of coding in C-family languages.

Re: Learning to code as a 30-year-old kid with Apple’s Swift Playgrounds

#37

Post by ericssmith »

madcow2011 wrote: post #4

I've been looking for something similar to this for my 12-year old son. Are there any other resources you guys can recommend to help teach coding? (that aren't Apple-product dependent?)

I teach my 6yo son using Pyret and Racket simultaneously. Pyret is, hands down, the best teaching language today, but hasn't been in use as long as Racket, so there aren't as many resources.

https://www.pyret.org

http://www.wescheme.org

https://docs.racket-lang.org/drracket/

http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/matthias/HtDP2e/

http://www.bootstrapworld.org

Someone below mentions Khan Academy. It's approach is similar and stays on the straight-and-narrow in its use of Javascript:

https://www.khanacademy.org/computing/computer-programming

Re: Learning to code as a 30-year-old kid with Apple’s Swift Playgrounds

#38

Post by spraak »

melling wrote: post #30
spraak wrote: post #13

I am not (yet) familiar with this app, but I do like to suggest to any new (young or old) programmers to give Racket along with the book 'Realm of Racket' a try. It's a simple enough programming language to get a good foundation with important principles, but also can take you nearly as far as you want. Edit: For those who downvoted my comment here, I'd really be curious to know why.

...or you could learn Swift and ship real apps. You'll have something to show your friends and family. You'll go much farther once you ship real software that does something that's interesting to you.

Um, are you trying to say that you can't make some 'real' with Racket? That you can't do something interesting with Racket? Because that's really not true, and you sound really snobby.

Re: Learning to code as a 30-year-old kid with Apple’s Swift Playgrounds

#40

Post by Zyst »

atom-morgan wrote: post #33
mikestew wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've been looking for something similar, discovered that this "something similar" exists, yet the Apple logo puts you off? A used iPad that can run this is probably a couple hundred dollars. Now, perhaps I've misinterpreted your question, and you'd just like a list of alternatives to keep your options open. I've not looked really hard, not having any kids and all, but there seems to be a dearth of options that meet…

Maybe they want to use existing hardware?

Why is parent getting down voted, not wanting to spend a couple hundred bucks, specially outside of the US where a couple hundred bucks can be what you make in a month, is a perfectly valid reason.
Post reply on HN