Introduction to Swift

We have a guest writer for the second consecutive blog post. You may remember that earlier this summer, I announced a new innovative approach to teaching some new subjects at BBS entitled “The 4 C’s”. The first "C" is coding. BBS students had their first coding class with Mr. Chambers yesterday. I have asked him to briefly talk about how our students are learning this critical new skill at Brainerd Baptist School. Although Taylor Swift has been all over the news this last week, our "swift" is different than what you might be thinking! 

We just kicked off our first coding class this week and the students were really excited. The programming language we are exposing the students to is Swift. This is the new language for Mac, iOS, Apple Watch, and Apple TV.

The curriculum we are using is Swift Playgrounds that was developed by Apple for the express purposes of schools helping to expose students to entry level coding.

In our first class, we looked at the differences between "commands and functions", and then worked through exercises on implementing them into code form. To finish up, the students were given a block of code, and they had to “fix it”. We discussed the difficulty in troubleshooting your own code vs someone else’s code.

Next we will be looking at the coding terms of "functions and loops".

I am excited that we are offering this class to our students. I've already received a number of emails inquiring about the student continuing to develop coding skills at home as well. I will be providing some additional resources for those students that want to continue learning coding more in-depth at the end of the quarter. If you have questions, or would like to learn more, please feel free to contact me.