Apple’s Swift Playground app could spawn a generation of (very) young coders

Swift Playgrounds makes coding easy and almost game-like with an interactive interface for the easy-to-learn Swift programming language from Apple. The app includes programming lessons where “students write code to guide onscreen characters through an immersive graphical world, solving puzzles and mastering challenges as they learn core coding concepts”. And there are built-in templates to encourage users to express their creativity and create real programmes.

Swift Playground iPad app is meant to spur an interest in coding in young children

Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of Software Engineering, echoed the sentiments of many in the crowd when he said he wished Swift Playgrounds was around when he was first learning to code. “Swift Playgrounds is the only app of its kind that is both easy enough for students and beginners, yet powerful enough to write real code. It’s an innovative way to bring real coding concepts to life and empower the next generation with the skills they need to express their creativity.”

If successful among kids, the app will be a masterstroke of sorts. It will spawn a generation of coders who start working on Apple’s Swift language and might not be that comfortable writing other programmes.

It would create a captive base of coders which could end up giving Apple a huge advantage in the years to come

It would create a captive base of coders which could end up giving Apple a huge advantage in the years to come. Given the app is so easy a lot of first timers might already be trying their hand at coding with Swift Playground.

It has been developed for use by first time coders. So using the Multi-Touch iPad interface, they can create entire programmes with only a few taps and there is a new intuitive coding keyboard with additional characters just a swipe away. The keyboard even has a predictive bar, presenting the most likely next commands or values based on context. There is also a library of common coding snippets to create new code with little or no typing.

A preview release of Swift Playgrounds is now available to Apple Developer Program members as part of the iOS 10 developer preview

This might be the first democratisation of coding and it is certainly the sort of thing only Apple will do.

A preview release of Swift Playgrounds is now available to Apple Developer Program members as part of the iOS 10 developer preview and will be available with the iOS 10 public beta in July. The final version of Swift Playgrounds will be available in the App Store for free this fall. The app is compatible with all iPad Air and iPad Pro models and iPad mini 2 and later running iOS 10.