Part of getting Apple devices into classrooms involves educating teachers, as well as students. For that reason, Apple recently staged a week-long Teacher Coding Academy for educators in the Southwestern City Schools and Columbus City Schools district.
The boot camp set out to teach Apple’s coding language Swift to teachers. This is so that they can go on and pass on the knowledge to kids.
“Their mission on educating these K-12 teachers who then will educate K-12 students — middle and high school students — and spark their ideas about these skills is really core to what we’re doing in Digital Flagship,” Cory Tressler, director of Digital Flagship at Ohio State, told The Lantern.
As part of the boot camp, 18 teachers had to design an app to address community-based challenges. They were put in groups for the project, with Apple supplying the necessary tech. Completing the boot camp gave teachers credits toward renewing their teaching licenses.
“Students of all backgrounds should have the opportunity to learn to code,” said Lisa Jackson, Apple’s Vice President of Environment, Policy and Social Initiatives. “We are thrilled to be working with Ohio State University and other local partners to create a sustainable community effort to bring coding to students and teachers across the region.”
According to the report, another course will be run next semester.
The rise of Swift
Swift was launched in 2014, and has rapidly become a popular coding language. Last year, it cemented its popularity by entering the top 10 programming languages as indicated on GitHub and Stack Overflow.
To promote Swift, Apple launched its introduced its “Everyone Can Code” initiative. This provides a syllabus for people learning the coding language. The program has expanded into numerous schools around the world.
