Apple’s New Game That Teaches Kids How To Code

http://ift.tt/2a57Fs9

Time Magazine | Lisa Eadicicco

Swift Playgrounds is the latest effort to help kids learn to become programmers

One recent evening, I spent my 40-minute commute guiding a friendly cyclops around a maze in search of gems. After moving the creature with a series of taps, he managed to navigate his way across the puzzle to advance to the next stage.

What I’m describing could be the premise of any smartphone game. But by playing this one, I’m learning the building blocks of computer programming.

Apple’s Swift Playgrounds platform, which the company unveiled last month and will be launching later this year, uses puzzles to teach newcomers the basics of writing computer code. The games and lessons are geared toward middle school students, but they are accessible to anyone with an iPad and a desire to learn how to build apps for Apple’s devices.

Apple’s new platform is just one of a class of apps, games and toys that seek to make computer programming easier to grasp, especially for children. Apps like Lightbot and games found onCode.org communicate the core concepts of writing code through basic puzzles. Toys like the Hackaball and Google’s new Project Bloks seek to impart these lessons by tasking children with programming tangible objects.

But Apple employees say Swift Playgrounds stands out because players use real lines of code. “We’re not hiding code, or running away from the fact that it is code,” says Wiley Hodges, director of tools and technologies product marketing at Apple.

Indeed, to help my character, appropriately named “Byte,” find his goal, I had to issue commands in the correct order. Each command is formatted just like a line of code in Apple’s programming language, called Swift. To walk toward the left, I had to enter the command “turnLeft( ).” Retrieving the gem at the end of the level requires the command “collectGem( ).” Some similar games, like the Star Wars-themed one on Code.org, also require players to input lines of code to move their character .

Read More

 

by MindMake via MindMake Blog