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

arstechnica.com

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

#51

Post by janekm »

thoughtsimple wrote: post #31
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 coupl…

And from watching the WWDC session it seems the playgrounds can have access to the whole iOS SDK, including rather fun stuff like corebluetooth so there is a huge amount of potential in Playgrounds.

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

#52

Post by Longhanks »

greggman wrote: post #46

Swift Playgrounds looks great but I'm surprised no one has mentioned the frustration that Apple is shipping something on iPad that other developers have been banned from making since iPad shipped From the Swift Playground website: > Send your code to a friend’s iPad using Mail, Messages, or AirDrop No other apps are allowed to do this because of the iOS Terms of Service restrictions

Pythonista does the same since months, just for Python code.

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

#53

Post by steve_taylor »

greggman wrote: post #46

Swift Playgrounds looks great but I'm surprised no one has mentioned the frustration that Apple is shipping something on iPad that other developers have been banned from making since iPad shipped From the Swift Playground website: > Send your code to a friend’s iPad using Mail, Messages, or AirDrop No other apps are allowed to do this because of the iOS Terms of Service restrictions

Codea has been around for a few years now. It lets you code iPad apps on the iPad using Lua. You can even export the project to Xcode so you can eventually deploy your creations to the App Store. And this is certainly not the only iOS-based coding environment. It looks like Apple has knowingly made an exception for this use case because it's not the type of thing they had set out to prevent with their rules around loadable code. Apps like Codea bring a lot of value to the platform.

http://twolivesleft.com/Codea/

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

#55

Post by ontouchstart »

thoughtsimple wrote: post #31
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 coupl…

I just did an experiment of upload XCode playground to iPad via AirDrop. It worked.

https://twitter.com/ontouchstart/status/753801598367731712

However, with the .playgroundbook format (folder), it seems that I can only export it to Mac (as a folder) and can not AirDrop back to iPad. And it seems that XCode 8 beta-2 does not support playgroundbook yet.

I am keeping an eye on Apple documentation:

https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/content/docum...

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

#57

Post by melling »

spraak wrote: post #38
melling wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...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.

Um, no, ... that's not what i'm saying. Snobby is thinking that you need to learn computer science concepts first. I'm saying that excitement is the most important thing. 30+ years ago, i got excited by typing hex codes in for C64 assembler games. Next i learned 6502 assembler from magazines and books so i could move sprites across the screen, etc

Playing with Swift on an ipad is a lot of fun.

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

#58

Post by Sukotto »

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 was going to message you but do not see any contact details in your profile.

Pasting your website, lead me to your contact link of team@futureleague.co ... is that best place for us to message you?

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

#59

Post by mathattack »

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…

We're soon launching an online course

Who is we?

btw - Every time I see a bunch of 130+ IQ engineers tackle education problems, I get optimistic about the future.

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

#60

Post by swift »

mathattack wrote: post #59
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…

We're soon launching an online course Who is we? btw - Every time I see a bunch of 130+ IQ engineers tackle education problems, I get optimistic about the future.

How do you know their IQs? I don't think I've ever heard anyone discuss their IQ in real life. I don't mean this as an attack; I'm just curious where the "130+ IQ" qualifier comes from.
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