Apple Trains Chicago Teachers To Put Coding In More Classrooms (engadget.com) 64
Apple has unveiled a partnership with Northwestern University and public schools to help teachers bring programming and other forms of computer science into Chicago-area classrooms. "The trio will set up a learning hub at Lane Tech College Prep High School that will introduce high school teachers to Apple's Everyone Can Code curriculum," reports Engadget. "They'll also have the option to train in an App Development with Swift course to boost the number of high school-oriented computer science teachers. Teachers will also have options for in-school coaching and mentorship to make sure they're comfortable with the curriculum when they're in front of actual students."
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
The real title should be "Apple Trains Beauhd To Put Apple Propaganda in More Slashdot Stories"
Actually . . . if you just slightly scratch the surface of this story, you'll see that it's not about teaching programming.
It's about teaching how to use Swift . . . a "programming" language that is a proprietary technology that belongs to Apple.
A programming course would have used something open and simple . . . like Python. Apple just wants to push Swift in this move.
Using a language owned by one vendor . . . kinda sorta puts you at the mercy of that vendor. Apple could easily, willy-nilly declare, "
Re:Wrong title (Score:4, Informative)
It's about teaching how to use Swift . . . a "programming" language that is a proprietary technology that belongs to Apple.
Uh...No. [swift.org]
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Apache License != proprietary (Score:3)
I thought all the articles making the "tailor Swift" pun mentioned that Apple distributes the reference implementation of Swift under the Apache License 2.0 [github.com]. If a work is distributed as free software under that license, it isn't "proprietary software" by the FSF's definition. What definition of "proprietary" are you using?
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Damn it you ifaggets need to spell it out you are so fucking stupid. SWIFT IS A DUMBED DOWN SUBSTITUTE FOR OBJECTIVE-C
Who cares? Does it work or doesn't it?
Is it Apache-licensed, or is it not?
When I was introduced to programming, we used ye olde Logo (with the turtle) and Basic. Those sure as hell were dumbed down. That's how programming has always been taught -- simplified so the barriers to entry are lower.
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You can check it out of the repository, build it yourself, modify it, etc, etc.
Very few high school students will be able to do any of that. In the real world, Swift is used for the following purposes:
1. Writing apps for Apple devices running MacOS or iOS.
It is not an appropriate choice for a first language taught in a public school. These students should be learning Python or Scratch. Even JavaScript would be more appropriate than Swift, and is used by Khan Academy's programming tutorials.
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A little more detail ie "On December 3, 2015, the Swift language, supporting libraries, debugger, and package manager were published under the Apache 2.0 license with a Runtime Library Exception, and Swift.org was created to host the project." https://swift.org/about/ [swift.org] and of course https://swift.org/LICENSE.txt [swift.org] and not to forget https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]. So it seems Apple could not sell swift and after having trained all of it's coders, it decided to open source it to save the cost of retraining it
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Why not something more relevant like Java/Javascript/Python or Rust?
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Swift is open source since nearly a decade and compiles to any majour platforms.
Next: "Everybody can do brain surgery!" (Score:5, Insightful)
Which is actually true as long as a good outcome is not required. The results will be about as bad as with the coding though.
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And yet we introduce the concepts that those brain surgeons will use in primary school.
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
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In many places, programming is still a fairly immature field. It's a pyramid scheme in a certain sense, because it relies on a constant influx of young too-stupid-to-know-better devs who burn themselves out pretty quickly. It's also dominated by fads du jour, and "getting something quick" takes precedent over something good/maintainable.
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Might also have the opposite effect: "I love coding, but I would have to work with _these_ morons? No, better become an MD or a lawyer..."
We are already seeing this effect, as all the moron coders have driven salaries down and made working conditions far worse. In fact, if you keep ideology out of it, this seems to be one factor that keeps the number of women in coding and in CS low.
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Almost everyone can learn to read and write to a decent level. Almost everyone can master basic maths. Nearly every kid can learn to assemble Lego.
It doesn't seem like school level coding should be any different. It's not brain surgery.
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I look at it as writing. Almost everyone learns to write, almost none of them will ever write for a living though. Writing at a basic level isn't too hard, writing a novel is quite hard. Basic programming isn't hard, programming at a professional level can get to be quite difficult.
My issue comes in when you get these asshats talking about how "programming is so easy anyone can do it". No, it's extremely difficult to do at a professional level. We're not paid what we are because we do something easy.
Yes, but in essence everyone is just saying "let's get children able to read and write at a basic level not "let's turn every child into Shakespeare or Tolstoy".
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If you want a more practical suggestion... the skills necessary for the occupation of Walmart greeter.
Yes. Mining the uncanny ability to morph from delivering a pleasant greeting to fascist receipt checker, in the span of one quick shopping trip... since the pay allows one to subsist at below the poverty level, identifying those sociopaths at an early age is critical to their proper recruitment.
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I have never, ever, encountered a greeter at Walmart who morphed into a receipt-checker.
You must go to one of the shitty WalMarts.
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If you've never seen a greeter check your receipt, you must have never bought anything at Walmart that is bigger than a plastic carry bag, such as the sort of computer on which one runs a Swift compiler.
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I've bought four or five laptops at WalMart. A desktop. Four or five tablets.
My local Walmart is in a small midwestern town. I've been to a number of bigger-city WalMarts, but I didn't hang around the front door where the greeter works long enough to witness bag checking.
It just isn't worth it to build a Hackintosh simply to run a Swift compiler on.
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Wow, since when does Ubuntu [swift.org] only run on Mac? I know people are worried that the Windows Subsystem for Linux would kill Linux, but I'm impressed Apple managed to do it quietly without anyone noticing, requiring a Mac to run Linux.
Last I checked, any modern PC can run Linux and thus, Ubuntu and I'm sure various flavors thereof. It even says they mention Ubuntu as that's what they tested on - likely other distributions of Linux work
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Where do I find the source tarball? I run NetBSD and swift clearly needs to be incorporated into pkgsrc.
Or can you only get a binary blob? A development tool that is a binary blob? Get serious. Somebody should be working on making it so the swift compiler and the entire toolchain can be compiled using swift.
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Whoops. I stand corrected. The source code for Swift is here [github.com]. Looks like it sits on top of Java.
Because that won't make Apple's (Score:2)
programmers cheaper. Same with Google and Facebook. Why train workers yourself when you can the public to throw money at it for you?
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Why not teach them to be lawyers?
Already too many. That's not an anti-lawyer crack, just that there WAS a huge push for more lawyers, law schools churned out new graduates, and now the profession is over-saturated.
or medicine?
Too expensive.
or accounting?
How many accountants do you need?
Only a small minority of kids will go on to be programmers. The majority won't go anywhere near it.
Maybe not, but a familiarity with the concepts will benefit you a lot more than simply as a bath towards an entry level coding job. More and more non-technical jobs are being eliminated. The law and doctors are positions unlikely to be that affected (robot surgeons not withstanding),
Babe (Score:2)
I went to a sock-hop at Lane Tech and Styx was the band. I didn't go there, but I dated a girl who went to Immaculata and she liked Styx, so she insisted. This is when Styx was still just a local Chicago band. I wouldn't have gone, but she was a freak.
12/10, would endure Lady again.
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What was her name? She probably is a chubbed up porker now. They all go to seed.
Whereas you are, of course, still the tautly muscled, devilishly handsome Adonis you always were.
Its not the teachers (Score:5, Insightful)
More cash did not help bring parts of the USA to some new educational level.
Code and new computer devices don't improve grades every generation.
All this support of computers got attempted over decades. The low test results stay the same.
Teach the in poor areas students math and science. English.
Use tests and exams to sort who should get a full scholarship to one of the very best colleges in the USA.
On merit so only the very best students who can study get a full scholarship.
Arts, biology, medicine, law. Work out what the community wants to see their best students learn.
Computer "work" may not resonate with some communities in the USA with students who want and can learn.
Medicine and law can be seen as the real pathway to a good wage.
To some communities "computer" work is a computer shop selling computers. It has no value in the community as a worthwhile job for the best students.
Stop making all students do something their community sees as a pathway to a below average job.
Stop spending more on "computers" and see if the community wants more support for getting students into law and medicine for their very best students.
For the rest offer support to get into a great number of vocational schools.
Sport, art, music, languages, math, science. Stop expecting "computers" to magically fix every "gap" in education every decade.
The only winners with "computers" is the brand that sells the computer and the sale of support coursework, robot kits.
Try talking with the local community, see what they want for their best students who can learn.
Support the rest of the students with coursework that actually interest them.
Big brand computers for decades did not make poor areas any better educated.
Irony (Score:1)
Indeed.
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Code and new computer devices don't improve grades every generation.
Are they supposed to? Or are they supposed to shift the focus away from older, less valuable skills like cursive handwriting and towards more useful ones such as computer literacy, logic and basic programming?
More teachers don't help with test scores.
More cash did not help bring parts of the USA to some new educational level.
Those things really helped in the UK. In particular class sizes (number of children per teacher) has been shown to have a significant impact on outcomes. There must be a reason why it failed to help in the US.
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It's not the code at Apple, it's the development environment. You could throw the best 'coders' in the world against that wall.
A prediction... (Score:2)