iPads, MakerEd and More in Education

"Students learning to create apps with Apple’s Swift programming language now have a way to validate their skills with a new certification program. App Development with Swift is a new academic certification course created by Certiport in partnership with Apple that measures students’ ability to program with Swift after completing a year-long program.

The new Swift certification program will be available starting this fall:"

If you are a developer, hope to become a developer, or are thinking about learning how to build apps at home, school or college, here are a few reasons why it may be time to start to learn Apple’s Swift language.

By Michelle Berkeley and Mary Ryerse - For students with an interest in coding, an instructional, user-friendly book like this is a great way to start.

Apple has unveiled a free curriculum designed to teach high school and community college students app coding schools. The Swift language course has already been adopted by six US community college systems that will distribute it to half a million students this fall. While it's generous on Apple's part, Tim Cook acknowledged that it needs to address an industry-wide shortage of coders, especially for enterprise apps. "That's really in its infancy, in terms of explosion, and so there's just a ton of opportunity here," he told USA Today.

The course entails around 180 hours of training with lesson plans, instruction and exercises for teachers. Students will "learn to code and and design fully functional apps, gaining critical job skills in software development and information technology," writes Apple. The program is an extension of Apple kindergarten to grade 12 "Everyone Can Code" curriculum that helps students get comfortable with code.

I was at a conference last July, and one of the other coding teachers said that in order for him to teach coding using Swift in his country (Poland) that he would have to justify, " Why Swift?" Initially I thought, "Well, why not? Apple has created this new language. They make great hardware and software for us to use when we teach." Now that I have had some time to reflect upon that simple, but powerful question, I think that I have a much better, more well-reasoned answer. Note: The following may be a little nerdy at times, but I will do my best to be in teacher mode the entire time so that the explanations are a simple and understandable as possible.