Apple expands its ‘Everyone Can Code’ program beyond the U.S.

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Want to learn Swift? Apple's happy to help.
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Having experienced success with its “Everyone Can Code” initiative inside the U.S., Apple is expanding its coding education program to more than 20 colleges and universities in other countries.

Twenty different international universities — in Denmark, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Australia, and the U.K. — will now offer Apple’s one-year Swift Curriculum, designed to give people tools to get jobs in the “app economy.”

The universities which will be offering the curriculum include Australia’s RMIT University, Mercantec in Denmark, Hogeschool van Arnhem en Nijmegen in the Netherlands, Unitec Institute of Technology in New Zealand and Plymouth University in the UK.

“We launched the Everyone Can Code initiative less than a year ago with the ambitious goal of offering instruction in coding to as many people as possible,” Tim Cook said, in a statement released late on Wednesday. “Our program has been incredibly popular among US schools and colleges, and today marks an important step forward as we expand internationally.”

The importance of learning to code

Apple has repeatedly pushed the importance of learning to code, and has launched a number of initiatives in this area. During his recent tour of Europe, Tim Cook described coding as an opportunity to communicate directly with more than 7 billion people around the world.

The company has also taken steps to promote code literacy by launching an App Accelerator in India, teaching locals to code, as well as making similar classes available for free inside Apple Stores.

Since launching its App Store in 2008, Apple claims that customers have downloaded upwards of 180 billion apps. Apple has also paid out $70 billion to developers in that time — “making it the most vibrant software marketplace in the world.”

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