Category: Learn to Code Classes

EU Code Week: Not Just for Schools

Our sessions for EU Code Week aren’t just for classrooms! Just in case you were looking at all the materials, like the Using this Site in Class page, and thinking it was aimed at schools only, I added a new page: Using this Site at Home.

It’s a bit like our Coding at Home series: the video session will be designed for you to follow along, no matter the setting. If you can view the video on a big screen while you code along on a separate iPad that would be amazing, but if you only have one device at home, you just make due with what you have.
All this stuff, the site, the videos, the links, they’re all designed just to give you a bit of support to explore coding on your iPad.

Code Week, European or Otherwise

Wherever you are, you’re more than welcome to catch our sessions. Heck, we’ve got an American living in Ireland co-presenting with someone from the UK.

So if you want to follow along and try to embrace coding during EU Code Week, feel free to register your event, even if it’s your own household! We’ve got some instructions for doing so here.

So grab your iPad, sit back, relax, and get ready for some coding!

Welcome Back to School!

For many of you, you’re arriving back at school over these last few weeks (or days, even).

Hopefully your coding journey won’t end with the return to school. After all, you can apply coding to a lot of your schoolwork.

While we’ve been working on some cool stuff for teaching coding in the classroom — virtual or otherwise — you can still try your hand at our Coding at Home series.

Learning to Code

As we’ve seen with all of our playgrounds, coding isn’t always about coding for coding’s sake.

Sometimes we’re trying to explore our creative side with photos or sound. Other times we’re creating our own brand new reality. In our next session, we’ll show you our story-telling creation.

We touched on it way back in the beginning of our coding at home adventure, but only briefly.

I love telling stories, and doing so with a Swift Playground and a little bit of code is all the more fun!

We’re going to demo building a short story in which you can navigate an environment and become a part of the story, yourself. So be sure to stay tuned for our next coding session!

And, speaking of which…

Lastly…

Happy coding!

Teaching Swift

[Update: The link below has been updated to point to our redirect to the Slack login. Please let us know if you want to join and the link has expired!]

By the way, if you’re a teacher and you teach Swift, or want to teach Swift in your classroom, I’ve created a new Slack instance called, fittingly enough: Teaching Swift.

[You can skip all the rest and hit this invite like: here if you’re already sold: Join Here]

Feel free to join if you want to talk to like-minded educators. We have channels for the new Develop with Swift curriculum, the older App Development with Swift book, Everyone Can Code, and a whole slew of other topics.

I have always been impressed by the Apple Distinguished Educators; they consistently put out amazing material and way above and beyond. I’ve learned a lot from you over the years.

If you’re keen to try out Swift in your classroom, join us and I’m sure you’ll find some fun stuff!

Join here: http://thecodehub.ie/teaching-swift/

Coding at Home: July 15th, Cipher

Join us today when we approach one of my all-time favorite playgrounds, Cipher, at 1pm, Irish time!

Recap: Sensor Arcade

We said goodbye to Sensor Arcade yesterday with a bit of cheat codes.

We’ll explore the Sensor Arcade infrastructure in some future lessons. The potential of using your iPad and its myriad of sensors is so exciting, and this is a great playground to test them all out!

Now we can see practical applications for all this code we’ve been learning about.

And we’ll certainly come back to these concepts and tools in the very near future.

Today’s session

For today, though, we’re going to explore one of my absolute favorite playgrounds: Cipher!

It’s a little bit about cryptography and coded messages and a tiny bit about code. But the reason why it’s my favorite playground is because it’s structured around a story.

We’ll experience the story and learn a little about crypto.

I can’t wait to get started on it with you. See you at 1pm!

Coding at Home: July 14th, Sensor Arcade, Gem Hunter

Join us today as we finish out Sensor Arcade at 1pm, Irish time!

Bumper Bash

We covered a lot of ground yesterday. In Bumper Bash, we learned about the collision handler, which lets us know which two sprites just collided with each other. This is a huge addition to our coding toolbox!

Now if we’re writing a game we can let the SpriteKit framework do the work of figuring out when two objects have collided.

Now, my high score wasn’t amazing for this one. Have you managed to beat it?

We’ll look at a few ways to cheat the system today — we’re coders, after all, we can write our own rules!

We’ll also explore the applyForce method on our sprites and see what that does.

Gem Hunter

We also moved on to Gem Hunter yesterday. This playground page combines all the inputs we’ve learned about: touch, light, sound, and collisions. We’re going to write a game that will use a few different ways of manipulating our player to get as many gems as possible.

My high score for this game, our first pass, also wasn’t brilliant, so please tell me you were able to beat me!

We’ll spend a little time rigging up some easy win scenarios today. Then we’ll think about what might make the game even more playable.

What behavior will our player have in reaction to light updates? Will we add some labels to see values from our events in real-time?

Come code with us today at 1pm, Irish time!

Coding at Home: July 13th, Bumper Bash

Join us today at 1pm, Irish time, for some more coding!

NB. We’re back at our usual time of 1pm, Irish time!

Recap: Sound Poppers

I hope you got to spend a bit of extra time with Sound Poppers and controlling those poppers to take out the balloons (and not the bombs!).

Did anyone beat my time?

Today’s session

Today we’ll continue exploring Sensor Arcade.

Remember when we made our own game/app a while ago?

We did some rough math to figure out if two objects collided in our scene. This let us make it look like a real game to our players.

This playground lesson uses a technology called SpriteKit. It sounds like a soda-making toolbox, but it’s Apple’s framework for building 2-dimensional games.

Using this framework, we can detect collisions between sprites, which are elements in our scene.

We’ll handle these collisions and call methods on our sprites to make them respond in suitably realistic ways.

Can you think of other places you might want to use this type of collision detection and physics (like applyImpulse, which we’ve already used)?

Join us today at 1pm and we’ll build some cool stuff!

Coding at Home: July 10th, Sensor Arcade, Sound Poppers

Join us today at 2pm today, Irish time, for some more coding with sensors!

NOTE the DIFFERENT time of 2pm! We’re just trying to keep you on your toes and really pushing for you to subscribe to our YouTube channel.

Yesterday’s lessons

Yesterday I hope you took some time to play around with different algorithms to see which one might result in the most fun for your game.

Remember, algorithms were simply a set of instructions and parameters we organized to solve a particular problem. There are many different ways to write code, some of which yield similar results. But now we can explore how well an algorithm performs by how well we do in the game!

In our default algorithm, provided by the playground, I got a high score of 63.2 meters and 4 donuts… not a great score, but not too bad.

Can you do better? Did you do better?

Today’s session

Today we move from the camera to the microphone!

We’re going to revisit pitch and tones today and use their numerical values to try and move things around the screen.

Come join us at 2pm, Irish time and we’ll make a bit of noise and have some fun!

Coding at Home: July 9th, Sensor Arcade, Dashing Donuts

🍩 Who doesn’t love donuts?

Join us today at 3pm, Irish time for more fun with our iPad sensors!

This week we’re jumping around with times a little bit. If you want to make sure you don’t miss an episode, obviously you can follow us here. But you can also subscribe to our channel (like and subscribe?) and you’ll get notifications when we go live.

Yesterday

Yesterday we learned about using a touch handler and wrote some code to move our player around the screen to catch cupcakes.

Did you beat my high score?

I hope you tried a few different strategies for moving the player. I also hope you tried your algorithms out on your friends, siblings, parents.

There’s nothing better than having someone play and enjoy the game you wrote!

Today’s session

So for today we’re going to use our camera, and possibly our cameras, both of them, to get light updates.

We’ll explore switching which camera we use and what properties we have access to on the Color that’s passed to us.

Will you be able to beat my high score today?

Join us at 3pm, Irish time, to find out!

Coding at Home: July 8th, a new challenge!

Join us today at 4pm Irish time for a new challenge!

We’re testing out your ability to switch it up this week, and we’ll be going live at 4pm today.

Today’s session @ 4pm

We’re going to start a super fun series today with Sensor Arcade!

I love this playground because it shows us what amazing capabilities we have in our hands with the iPad.

We start off writing a touch event handler to handle when and where a user puts their finger on the screen.

This is an intermediate playground, so it definitely helps if you’ve gone through the Everyone Can Code Puzzles lessons, first.

But if you’ve been following along with the Lights, Camera, Code playground or the Sonic Workshop sessions you should be well able for this.

Game-based learning

A huge motivation for working on the code in these next few sessions will be all about the games. We’ll write code to practice and then play our own games, using the different sensors on the iPad — the touch screen, microphone, light sensor in the camera — as input devices and controllers.

And the great thing about coding our own games is we can see and feel how our code affects the way the game is played.

I can’t wait to get cracking on this one. See you at 4pm!

Coding at Home: Revisiting an Old Swan Friend

Join us today at THREE P.M., Irish time, when we revisit an old friend!

Note the later time, we’ll see you at 3, Irish time, instead of 1.

Swan’s Quest, Revisited

So now that we’ve finished Sonic Workshop, we’re going to revisit an old friend today.

With our newly-minted knowledge about closures, we’re going to see how they apply to Chapter 2 of Swan’s Quest.

You can either work with your existing copy of Swan’s Quest: Chapter 2, or download a new copy from our playground feed for WWDC.

We’ll talk about those pesky DispatchQueues and Timers and hopefully they’ll make a lot more sense.

Next!

Once we revisit old times, we’ll move right on to one of my favorite playgrounds.

Sensor Arcade takes advantage of all the sensors we have built into our iPad that we take for granted.

We’ll play with touch handlers, like we did in Sonic Workshop. We’ll also play with light handlers, which uses properties of the camera to tell us about brightness levels in the room around us.

I can’t wait to show you around this playground and see what we can do with Swift!

See you at 3pm, Irish time!