Irish EU Code Week Hackathon: Complete!

I’ve been involved with EU Code Week’s Irish hackathons for the last few years, and this year’s edition was a hybrid of online and in-person at Microsoft’s DreamSpace in Leopardstown Wednesday.

Pam and Julie did an amazing job running the event, as usual, and there was some great work done by the students.

On the first day I gave a little presentation on the App Design Journal and gave the students some tips straight from the App Design page, here, to help them organize their thoughts before they dove right into coding.

It’s a real highlight of the year, and show off what we can do with some of these transition year students in Ireland.

New Content! SwiftUI App Walk-Through in Swift Playgrounds

Well, it’s been a long time, but we finally have some new coding resources for you!

*But* you’ll have to toggle one little switch to make sure it works well for you, especially if your iPad or Mac is set to something other than English as its first language. We’ll get to that in a second, though.

SwiftUI App Walk-Through

For those of you who have been keeping up to date with Swift Playgrounds, you might have seen that it now supports these amazing walk-throughs in the app on the iPad (and Mac) that help introduce you to code.

And, like we did with Swift Playground Books, we can even author our own!

It’s a way to guide a student through an app and help them figure out how to either accomplish a task in an app or see how you did it.

Apple has some great examples that will show you how to make all sorts of magic, and if you look at the App Gallery you’ll learn how to perform animations in SwiftUI, configure your app’s navigation, build up views, and more.

Drawing Flags

A really fun activity to explore composing views is to look at the flags of the world and try and re-create them with simple colors… in some cases we can get more complex and start to add shapes like circles, triangles, stars.

In fact, there’s an exercise you can perform outlined in the App Design Workbook, which I’ve talked about before.

From the App Design Workbook, by Apple

I love that we have a good suite of exercises to practice our layout capabilities at our fingertips!

So I came up with a walk-through app called Drawing Flags. You can download it from the Code Hub Adventures feed in Swift Playgrounds, which you can subscribe to here (for free):

Subscribe to Adventures

The goal is to fill in implementations for as many flags as you possibly can.

The walk-through, which you access through the library icon in the top right toolbar of Swift Playgrounds, will show you how to make an Irish flag, and then how to make a Dutch flag.

You’ll learn to add cases to a switch statement, you’ll learn how to create new files to create your flag view in. You will make your flags look more polished by using view modifiers.

I would love to hear how you get on with it, so definitely send me feedback, as it’s a work-in-progress and we’ll have plenty of challenges coming soon.

Non-English Languages

The one issue, at the moment, is that you might see the following if you have your iPad set to something other than English, as the main language:

A screenshot of Drawing Flags in Swift Playgrounds with some errors in the walk-through pane.

You can fix this, for now, by turning on Author Debug mode in Swift Playgrounds.

** If you prefer video, the instructions/walk-through for this process is available in this video.**


Open up the Settings app on your iPad.

Scroll down to the bottom of the tableview on the left of your iPad (if you’re in a left-to-right language locale).

You should see an item in there for Playgrounds. Tap to open it.

There’s a switch you can toggle above the version information for Author Debug Mode. Turn that switch on. Then try reloading the Drawing Flags app in Swift Playgrounds and you should be good to go!

Enable Modalità creazione debug on your Italian iPad

Teaching Code: A New Series

Almost by accident, I started a new live stream today. I’m not 100% sure of the hours or the timing of these, but the videos will be available in the Teaching Code playlist, because that’s the goal of these sessions: to show you all the resources available on your iPad for teaching code.

This should be especially useful for schools who have an iPad one-to-one programme and teachers who have some creative students who want to add another tool to their toolbox.

SwiftStudentChallenge 2022!

It’s that time of year again, and we have such a limited time!

The Swift Student Challenge is on and it’s a great opportunity to push yourself to create something of which you can really be proud.

Now, the deadline is April 24th at midnight (Pacific time, but, as I say in the video, I would encourage you to push for your own local midnight… something always goes sideways at the end and you want to have plenty of time).

The challenge, this year, is centered around Swift Playgrounds 4, and its ability to build full-fledged apps!

I threw together a little video to help you read the T&Cs and maybe find a path towards an app you can really get stuck into. Check it out here:

And here are a few links to help get you on your way…

Swift Student Challenge: https://developer.apple.com/wwdc22/swift-student-challenge/

The full T & Cs for the Swift Student Challenge: https://developer.apple.com/wwdc22/swift-student-challenge/policy/

Apply now: developer.apple.com/wwdc22/swift-student-challenge/apply

For students younger than 13 in the US or 16 in Europe, get your guardian to email [email protected] allowing you to apply.

Getting Started

Swift, Apple’s Open Source Language: https://www.swift.org

Swift Student Challenge on the Developer Forums: https://developer.apple.com/forums/tags/swift-student-challenge/

App Gallery Tutorials: https://developer.apple.com/tutorials/sample-apps

Inspiration from past winners: https://www.wwdcscholars.com

Themes

These are not the only themes you could use for inspiration or focus, but they’re a good start:

The Process

App Design Journal: https://education-static.apple.com/coding-club-kit/appjournal.key

App Design Workbook: http://education-static.apple.com/coding-club-kit/appworkbook.key

Best of luck!

Swift Playgrounds Author Template for Xcode 13!

Swift Playgrounds Icon

Woohoo! https://developer.apple.com/download/all/?q=swift%20playgrounds

Apple’s updated the Swift Playgrounds Author Template for Xcode 13, which is huge news for people (like me) who author Swift Playground Books.

I’ve talked in the past about building playground books with the author template (the video is here). It’s a great tool for helping you build rich experiences for your students.

With this new download, you can build your playground book without having to keep Xcode 12 around. Now, the template is reliant on a certain version of Swift, so you may need to install a separate build of Swift (which you can get from here: https://www.swift.org/download/), and I’ll go into how to do that (and maybe *why*) at a later date.

In the meantime, I’ve got to go grab my copy to get cracking on a few new Swift Playground books!

Swift Playgrounds 4.0: Christmas Come Early!

Swift Playgrounds Icon

Well, it’s finally here: Swift Playgrounds 4.0!

You can now build entire apps on your iPad and ship them to the App Store. This is a huge update and there’s a ton of great content to go with the update that will teach you how to build apps (with SwiftUI, even!).

Go check it out and I’m sure I’ll have some walk-throughs for you soon!

Prototyping Swift Playground Books

Swift Playgrounds Icon

While you’re waiting, with bated breath, for Swift Playgrounds 4.0 to ship, you might be playing around with Swift Playgrounds, whether it’s on a Mac or on an iPad.

This app and Swift Playgrounds (and Swift Playground Books, which we can author, ourselves — see our two videos on authoring playgrounds with the author template and by copying another book) are amazing tools for teaching coding.

Prototyping

But we talk a lot about prototyping when we talk about building apps. The App Design Workbook and App Design Journal teach you how to use Keynote to prototype an app experience quickly so that you can prove out your ideas and flow before you pour out the blood, sweat, and tears on the actual app.

This saves us from a lot of work that might be for nothing if our core idea isn’t all its cracked up to be. Prototypes let us figure out if there’s something there and whether it’s worth investing the time to develop the idea out into an actual app.

Well, the same thing applies when you’re building Swift Playgrounds and especially Playground Books. These are like stories and games and instruction all bundled into one package, so of course there’s a lot of complexity there.

Keynote

I created a little Keynote theme that might help you storyboard out your Swift Playground Books, which you can download from here. Simply download that file an unzip it and double-click it, and it’ll install the template for you to use when you create new Keynote files.

It’ll give you a title screen first, and when you add new slides to the presentation you should choose the Playground Prototype slide type, and it’ll give you an area for prose in the upper left hand corner, an area below for code students might run on that particular page, and a dummy live view on the right hand side where you can sketch out what the code drives.

This way, just like an app, you can storyboard out your whole book experience and see how people will flow through the book. You can pinpoint what coding techniques you want to show off or teach or enable on a given page, as well as any instruction or story you might tell on each page.

Hopefully you find this useful, like I have!

EU Code Week 2021: Sneak Peek

October 21

October 21st is barreling towards us, as is our App Inclusivity Challenge!

We’ll have a lot of hands on with Keynote prototyping, as well as the next leap: to code!

As a part of our activity, I’ve thrown together a playground based on a prototype one of Lyndsey’s students did. The goal is to show you (or your students) how the user interface relates to code.

If you’re curious and want to get a sneak peek of some of what we’ll be working you through on Thursday, go ahead and download this playground to your iPad or Mac. It’s in the main Code Hub Playgrounds feed, which you can access here: https://www.thecodehub.ie/playgrounds/

If you already subscribe to the feed, this new playground will show up when you tap on More Playgrounds > See All. It should look a bit like this:

It’s called Europe Code Week 2021: App Inclusivity Playground, and there are plenty of instructions in the playground, itself. If you’re lost, though, you can always join us on Thursday. We’ll work through the App Inclusivity activity and how you might use it in your classroom.

See you then!

EU Code Week 2021 is Here!

It’s October again and that means EU Code Week is back!

And this year I’m working on a little project with a few brilliant folks on an EU Code Week Challenge called the Inclusive App Design challenge.

The challenge is all about considering people from many different backgrounds with many different types of abilities when you design your apps.

The Activity & the Audience

Keynote

This activity is perfect for teachers who might have an iPad 1-to-1 classroom or school, but you can adapt it, no matter the gear you have on hand.

It’s also perfect for you if you don’t have a background in coding. We spend a lot of the activity just thinking about what makes an app and how we might design it to accommodate all sorts of users.

Introduce -- Brainstorm -- Plan -- Prototype -- Share
Working through the process

Now, we will still touch on coding, of course, as it is EU Code Week, but hopefully we’ll do so in as non-threatening a way as possible. To do that, I’ll show you Swift Playgrounds and the really fun Answers playground.

Answers playground icon
Answers Playground

This is a playground where students write code to get answers from their fellow students and can use those answers in their code later.

You’ll see how you can design your code and app at all sorts of levels.

For those who want to build out their creative vision, you’ll learn about Keynote prototypes and the power you can wield, putting your idea in people’s hands.

You can read more about the activity and what’s involved here: https://apple.co/eucodeweek_UK

Try it with Us

October 21

If you want to see how you might use this activity in your class, feel free to join us!

We’ll be running a 90 minute session on Thursday, October 21st at 18:00 CEST. We’ll walk through how to approach the activity and what you can do in your own classroom.

Register here: https://ec.europa.eu/eusurvey/runner/Inclusive-App-Design-CodeWeek-Apple

I hope you’ll be able to come; I think we’ll have some great tips and tricks for you to use this in your own classroom!