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Apple and Northwestern University Partner to Train Chicago Teachers on 'Everyone Can Code' Curriculum

That is exactly my point, Apple is not spending $1.00 on this project, they have abandoned the whole idea about coding, hoping volunteers and kind folk to take over..Where are the video tutorials..Why lock it to 2018 hardware?

If Apple was serious, then "everyone can code" would mean everyone from 6 to 60+ years old, there would be a series of pathways, so that you can progress from basic swift into high end languages, this would not take that long, it would generate a lot of work for people, script writers, video editors, authors, developers, on screen talent, it would encourage big industry to see the long term value...

Apple has abandoned this project, like it has FCPX/Logic, the only folks busy with this project are the marketing department..But in 6 months, this will all be forgotten..No one will care about everyone can code...This is a dead project!
 
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tardegrade said:
The new logitech keyboard announced to go with the iPad isn't a bluetooth keyboard. It's got a smart connector to the case which passes through the lightening port, and the lightening port itself is pass-through to the case. The keyboard is detachable and held on by strong magnets to the case.

Sure it's as ugly as sin, but teachers wouldn't have to deal with pairing. Whether or not the keyboard is as good / smart as the iPad Pro one's we'll have to see.
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Sounds such a hassle compared to the smart connector on the Pro's, that's a really elegant solution that Apple appears to be going out of their way not to use. Wonder how expensive they deem it to be?!
 
Exactly, the use of "everyone can code" was just a pathetic attempt to justify a new overpriced underpowered ipad, this event had no releveance to code, or education other than to try and flog it to school administrators.

So why not create a $50 ipad and a $300 laptop? Why does the ipad need cellular?? Why not just one device, a cheaper laptop that can run IOS??? Apple is not interested in education 1 bit...
 
I took a class in BASIC many years ago and about a third of the class seemed to actually “get it”. Some dropped out for lack of interest and frustration. I’ve checked out Swift and it’s basically just another programming language. So maybe instead of “Everyone can code” it should be “Everyone should be be given the opportunity to try coding. Even if one has little aptitude or interest in coding, an informal introduction to it is valuable for just general knowledge.
 
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I spent many weekends and school holidays coding on the ZX Spectrum, and I loved it, sadly it was damaged and stopped working, so I lost interest, the point Apple has missed is that coding should not be limited to the wealthy 0.001% of the US market, those that can afford a $4000 laptop and a $500 ipad, if you buy all the accessories and dongles for the laptop and ipad...

If Apple was serious about coding, and it is NOT, then it would have released Swift for use on older devices, unveiled a $50 ipad and a $300 laptop...

Can anyone explain with this hunk of junk new ipad needs cellular??? I cannot understand that..I have an ipad, without cellular, from late 2013, locked to 9.3.5, and it still works, cracked screen, the home button long broken, it still works well, and it would be ideal as a way to code with when on shift....

But sadly Apple is only flogging useless devices it knows 99% of the population cannot afford!!!
 
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Naimfan said:
Hope they bring it to the Denver-Boulder area.

And, for that matter, everywhere that wants it.
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if anybody is interested in coding, there is ZERO need for anything like they offering. There are so many tutorials out there for anything you can imagine. This has nothing to do with helping somebody, their only motive is to get more people bound to Apple ecosystem which in the end means $ :)
 
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Astonished (no, not really) so many here are so invested and upset (some, angry) in a program Apple is proposing that doesn't pertain to them and is instead for others.

More of the same.
 
tylersdad said:
What's the point? More and more coding jobs are heading overseas. Software development is a shrinking field in the US. You want some career advice kids? Specialize in something that requires a person on site to perform the work. Doctors, lawyers, accountants, service industry...all jobs with futures.

Software development? Very little future as long as companies believe they can hire someone in India for 20% of the cost of a US developer and get the same level of service.
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You just mentioned a bunch of careers that either do not pay very much (service industry), or require extended education (doctor, law) resulting in what amounts to actual hundreds of thousands of dollars in student loan money, which handcuffs these people financially for years.

It is my general opinion that we need to quit blindly trying to feed every student into college for a worthless degree and teach them financial skills in school so that they can make an EDUCATED decision before they decide to dump $5k a semester (at bare minimum) into college tuition, fees, and books with the expectation of being handed a well-paying job on the other side. Deciding to be successful is a conscious decision that people make at some point in their lives, it's not something that just 'happens' as they follow some 'path' that they were told to follow.

I think most of us that have been around software development know how it goes for companies once they outsource the majority of their development work. Everyone is trying to feed people into 'coding', but it takes more than learning some syntax to do this on a daily basis and not hate it and be productive. There are niches to fill in the development world, and having passions along side of the development knowledge allow you to get into these spots. Passion leads to motivation, and motivation leads to success.

Anyhow, these are just my opinions and I am probably just some quack ********ing on the internet from a cardboard box next to Starbucks.
 
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RedReplicant said:
I think most of us that have been around software development know how it goes for companies once they outsource the majority of their development work. Everyone is trying to feed people into 'coding', but it takes more than learning some syntax to do this on a daily basis and not hate it and be productive. There are niches to fill in the development world, and having passions along side of the development knowledge allow you to get into these spots. Passion leads to motivation, and motivation leads to success.

Anyhow, these are just my opinions and I am probably just some quack ********ing on the internet from a cardboard box next to Starbucks.
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Yeah you're quack, and I'm quack too because I agree with you.

I think a lot of "coders" can get by and be productive. The problem I'm finding is many lack the drive to innovate or like you said.. pursue their passions. I've always told my juniors there's a difference between a coder and an engineer. Coders are just code monkeys who are given a task and just do the work. They're great at churning tickets and just stomping bug. Engineers are code monkeys who ALSO want to drive and innovate their pieces and products. Instead of just doing the work, they also think about how something can be improved even if it required complete re-do.

The same as any profession ... not everyone can be an engineer/coder just because they put the effort towards it.
 
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RedReplicant said:
You just mentioned a bunch of careers that either do not pay very much (service industry), or require extended education (doctor, law) resulting in what amounts to actual hundreds of thousands of dollars in student loan money, which handcuffs these people financially for years.

It is my general opinion that we need to quit blindly trying to feed every student into college for a worthless degree and teach them financial skills in school so that they can make an EDUCATED decision before they decide to dump $5k a semester (at bare minimum) into college tuition, fees, and books with the expectation of being handed a well-paying job on the other side. Deciding to be successful is a conscious decision that people make at some point in their lives, it's not something that just 'happens' as they follow some 'path' that they were told to follow.

I think most of us that have been around software development know how it goes for companies once they outsource the majority of their development work. Everyone is trying to feed people into 'coding', but it takes more than learning some syntax to do this on a daily basis and not hate it and be productive. There are niches to fill in the development world, and having passions along side of the development knowledge allow you to get into these spots. Passion leads to motivation, and motivation leads to success.

Anyhow, these are just my opinions and I am probably just some quack ********ing on the internet from a cardboard box next to Starbucks.
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Well, I agree with much of this. Kids need to be told that the trades are a good place to build a career as well. Plumbing, heating and air, sheet metal fabrication, etc.

I stand by my assertion that learning to code for the purpose of obtaining a job as a developer/programmer/software engineer/etc. is mostly a dead end pursuit. I've seen it firsthand at my company: thousands of highly-skilled US developers and tech workers let go for cheap Indian labor who, most of the time, don't understand the projects they're working on or the work they've been asked to do. They cycle in and out of projects like day laborers. The rush to hire cheap labor has sent demand for this labor higher and higher, which means the turnover is frequent.
 
mi7chy said:
Students can get much more real world experience out of a $35 Raspberry Pi than they ever will with the $300 iPad.

And, why are they trying to reinvent https://code.org/ and https://hourofcode.com?
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Disagree.

The most popular computers in the "real world" now are smartphones and obvously iPads are technically equivalent. I think Raspberry Pis are also useful for learning many useful things. But that doesn't make iPads useless for "Real world" experience.
 
Smeaton1724 said:
No I mean keyboard. It is easier to code using a keyboard than a touchscreen as the onscreen keyboard obscures part of the screen.
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You don’t need that much screen just to learn to code. Lots of rich and/or famous coders learned on a teletype, TV set (connected to an Apple II or C64), 80x24 CRT, or card punch.
 
firewood said:
You don’t need that much screen just to learn to code. Lots of rich and/or famous coders learned on a teletype, TV set (connected to an Apple II or C64), 80x24 CRT, or card punch.
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I started my programming life at 7-years-old with a TRS80. After that it was the VIC20. After that it was the Apple IIe, and so on and so on.

Yeah, you can program on a TRS80 with the bare minimum, but would you really want to? Probably not. Likewise, going from a 20"+ screen down to a 10" screen would be very difficult to handle. You can't fit much onto that 10" screen without compromising on something such as font size.

No thanks.
 
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I know Apple wants to push Swift coding, but I think schools should consider starting students out on HTML, CSS, and Javascript. The resources needed are minimum (any computer with a text editor and a browser). The feedback from the student's efforts is immediate. And the results, even if not uploaded to a web server, can be quite sophisticated and impressive. And with many companies, including Google, Microsoft, and Apple, stating their support for Progressive Web Apps, the skills they develop will be more cross-platform and useful upon graduation.
 
bjoswald said:
American kids, by and large, don't seem to care about coding, so this is a wasted effort.
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Not from what I've seen.
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ChrisCW11 said:
Everyone can code, just not on the iPad that we want students to use.
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Seriously. Just give them all cheap af Linux laptops with GCC, Python, a JS engine, or Java, and that's all they need. A cheap Chromebook isn't ideal but works too. This problem was solved over a decade ago. What more are they aiming for?
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blackcrayon said:
Disagree.

The most popular computers in the "real world" now are smartphones and obvously iPads are technically equivalent. I think Raspberry Pis are also useful for learning many useful things. But that doesn't make iPads useless for "Real world" experience.
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Programming on a smartphone is not programming for smartphones. You write smartphone software on a PC.
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tylersdad said:
What's the point? More and more coding jobs are heading overseas. Software development is a shrinking field in the US. You want some career advice kids? Specialize in something that requires a person on site to perform the work. Doctors, lawyers, accountants, service industry...all jobs with futures.

Software development? Very little future as long as companies believe they can hire someone in India for 20% of the cost of a US developer and get the same level of service.
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It's good to know how to code for many of those fields. Basic Python scripting knowledge can save a lot of gruntwork. A little experience with coding can help people think in new ways.
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swingerofbirch said:
It seems like they're holding Swift Playgrounds hostage on the iPad so you have a reason to buy one, when actual coding is done on the Mac.

It's more logical and cost-effective for the consumer to teach on the device that can actually execute what you're being taught.
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I also would not introduce someone to programming using Swift. There are too many ways to do everything in it due to legacy support and syntax tricks, the libraries are too Apple-specific, and many things like tuples are unintuitive compared to in other languages. Kids don't need to spend time grappling with the types system, objects vs structs, Array vs NSArray, Float vs CGFloat, the nonsensical substrings, and the 9999 different ways to do an enum.
 
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The idea Apple is pushing Swift is not entirely correct, sure this might be a tiny part of the space-ships plans, but really in the cold light of day, Apple is not actually bothered one way or the other.

The fact is, the literature is vague, there are no Apple produced video on Swift, there is no Apple owned Swift website. I checked, I cannot find a mention of Swift anywhere on the APple.com website..

Having done a search, I found Everyone can code website, it is plain, no video, just text and a few photographs, nothing really useful...

So please can someone explain how Apple is keen on Swift or Everyone can code, when they hide the websites??? That tells me Apple has abandoned the project, and for pure brand sake is keeping the basic website, which offers nothing useful. So Apple is not keen on Swift, that is fact!!
 
Msivyparrot said:
The idea Apple is pushing Swift is not entirely correct, sure this might be a tiny part of the space-ships plans, but really in the cold light of day, Apple is not actually bothered one way or the other.

The fact is, the literature is vague, there are no Apple produced video on Swift, there is no Apple owned Swift website. I checked, I cannot find a mention of Swift anywhere on the APple.com website..

Having done a search, I found Everyone can code website, it is plain, no video, just text and a few photographs, nothing really useful...

So please can someone explain how Apple is keen on Swift or Everyone can code, when they hide the websites??? That tells me Apple has abandoned the project, and for pure brand sake is keeping the basic website, which offers nothing useful. So Apple is not keen on Swift, that is fact!!
Click to expand...

You want to go to their developer site for this sort of info.

https://developer.apple.com/swift/
https://developer.apple.com/develop/
https://developer.apple.com/videos/
 
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The materials for Swift are there but behind a paywall so not publicly accessible like code.org or hourofcode.com.
 
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