Apple has reportedly announced that it will host “Hour of Code” lessons at its stores in the coming week, marking the fifth year that the company has been offering free coding lessons for children.
The company kicked off registration through which those who sign up will get access to free “Hour of Code” lessons that will kick off on December 4 and end on December 10. Registration will also take place at Apple Stores. Apple is also panning kick off its new Swift Playgrounds educational challenge which is part of teaching the young generation on how to code in Swift. The latter refers to the iPhone maker’s programming language which can be used to create apps that are of high quality.
“Young aspiring coders can learn coding basics during a Kids Hour session, while those age twelve and above can use Swift Playgrounds on iPad to learn coding concepts and even program robots,” stated Apple in a post.
The “Hour of Code” challenge is a program that was initiated by code.org and Apple has been a part of it for the past few years. Apple has scheduled its “Hour of Code” event at around the same time as the Computer Science Education Week. The Kids Hour session will allow young people who are interested in coding to learn the core coding concepts. Children who are more than 12-years-old can use iPads to take advantage of the Swift Playgrounds s as to learn coding concepts and perhaps even learn how to program robots.
There will also be a new Teacher Tuesday’s session through which educators will get to gain the skills necessary to teach students how to code using new discussion topics and new resources. Students will receive invites to build a new robot as part of the new Hour of Code challenge through the Swift Playgrounds app. They will also get to customize the robot with new parts such as electric arms and cyborg eyes.
The Swift Playgrounds app can be downloaded free of charge from the Play Store and it is available in 15 languages. They include Japanese, Chinese, English, Spanish, French, Italian, and German just to name a few.
