Swan's Quest Archives < The Code Hub

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

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

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.

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!

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!

Coding at Home: WWDC Special #4, the Wrap-Up

Join us today at 1pm when we talk about the final chapter of Swan’s Quest!

The Quest

So Swan’s Quest ended on Friday with one more performance for the swan in Swan’s Quest, Chapter 4.

We added the the playground book for Chapter 4 to our special WWDC feed for ease of use putting it on your iPad.

We’ll spend a little bit of time talking about the final chapter today. The first chapter was an excellent reminder to make sure our apps are accessible, because there are all kinds of users out there.

We focused on playing notes and organizing our code to enable us to do so in a flexible and (relatively) easy to use manner in the last three chapters.

I’ve posted the code online (and will add it to the video description) for solving the puzzle for Chapter 4.

The last three challenges were designed for attendees of WWDC, who are typically professional software engineers who are doing this sort of thing for their day job. So if you’re still learning Swift with us, don’t be too frustrated. These playgrounds give us a nice level of knowledge to aspire to, especially if you’re into music. But don’t forget, most of this code is based on fundamentals you’ve just learned.

Other WWDC goodies

We’ll talk briefly about WWDC and some of the other fun sessions they had this year.

And I’ll also show you one little feature for Reality Composer on the iPad I didn’t realize was there (thanks to @PaulHamilton8!).

This will let us add images to our Reality Composer scenes.

It was an exciting week of great content from the engineers at Apple. We hope you enjoyed our little diversion to Swan’s Quest!

I’ll see you at 1pm, Irish time!

Coding at Home: WWDC Special #3

Join us today for our live coding session at 1pm, Irish time!

Today’s session

Today we’re going to explore Swan’s Quest: Chapter 3, but I’m not quite sure the material lends itself to our session. We’ll see.

There’s some music theory thrown in, subdivision of notes, pitches, frequencies… It’s a little bit Greek to me. But we can take a poke around the playground in the beginning, anyway, and see if we can make head or tails of it.

!! Image from Swan’s Quest: Chapter 3 WWDC20 Session

There are also Protocols, which is an interesting Swift feature, and enumerations, or Enums. This, again, is a little beyond the scope of what we’ve covered so far, but I hope we can make some of it clear.

As before, you can download the Swan’s Quest: Chapter 3 playground from The Code Hub WWDC Playground feed.

Or…

It might not be “or”, it might be “and.”

There was an awesome session yesterday called Create Swift Playgrounds content for iPad and Mac.

The playground book they used in that session was excellent, so we may talk a little bit about that playground book, which is now available in The Code Hub WWDC Playground feed.

We’ll see you at 1pm!

Coding at Home: WWDC Special #2

Join us today at 1pm for some more fun, playing with the new set of playgrounds from Apple, Swan’s Quest!

Swan’s Quest, Chapter 2

Wow.

Have you seen the session for Swan’s Quest, Chapter 2?

It is an awesome playground and builds on the previous challenge, but boy oh boy, are we in deep!

There are some brand new concepts we haven’t covered yet, in our sessions. But we’re going to dive in, anyway, and try and explain and help you solve this new challenge.

First, you’ll want to grab the latest playground from the playground feed we mentioned yesterday.

There’s no VoiceOver setup this time, today we’ll be working with sound, though.

What we’re almost certainly going to want to do is open up the Developer app, either on our iPad or on a Mac.

The Developer page for many sessions (including the Swan’s Quest ones we care about) has a tab bar near the top: Overview, Transcript, and Code.

We’re going to tap on the Code tab if we get stuck.

This tab includes all the code mentioned in the videos. You can copy the code and paste it right into your playground.

This playground uses some advanced stuff. In addition to more advanced audio stuff than we’ve played with, so far, in The Code Hub classes, it includes concepts like Timers, which have some interesting properties, and guard statements, which is a handy control mechanism in Swift.

We’ll talk about all of that stuff today on the session.

In these cases, where the content is that bit more difficult or maybe just something you’re not familiar with (yet), it helps sometimes to copy and paste in code someone insists will work, try it, run it, then play around with it. You can learn a lot by copying someone else’s code and then breaking it!

For the advanced

If you’re blazing ahead, congratulations!

I’ve added the blank Quest Create playground book in the feed, too, so you can grab that and add it to your iPad. It gives you a really interesting starting point for building your own adventure based off this code.

We’ll see you at 1pm, bring some popcorn, patience, and your coding pants!

Coding at Home: June 24th, WWDC Special #1

Join us today at 1pm to get set up for following along with the Swan’s Quest, the new playgrounds from Apple!

Today’s session

I love what Apple is doing with this Swan’s Quest series! We learn about accessibility, which is a hugely important, and often overlooked aspect of programming.

We are going to visit the Swan’s Quest, Chapter 1 session and download the playgrounds and set up our iPad to follow along.

I posted a short video yesterday to walk you through getting set up to use this playground.

So go to the session link and download the playground book.

You’ll need to unzip the file. I had to do it in Files on my desktop… so you can even download that playground book to your desktop and Airdrop it to your iPad for tomorrow’s session.

!!!UPDATE!!!

You can now add the playground book to your iPad via a Swift Playground feed. I’ve added a special, temporary subscribe button on https://thecodehub.ie/playgrounds/ that you can use, from your iPad, to add the playground to your own iPad.

Get the playground book on your iPad, and the next thing you need to do is enable Voiceover support.

First, open up the settings app on your iPad and tap on the Accessibility icon in the settings list.

Scroll down to the bottom of the Accessibility settings and tap on Accessibility Shortcut:

Tap on that item and we’re going to tap on VoiceOver from the next list:

This will let us enable and disable Voiceover by triple-clicking the home button on your iPad.

We can also turn on VoiceOver by going back to the main Accessibility setting screen. At the very top we can tap into VoiceOver and enable it by toggling the switch at the top of the screen:

We’ll need this to solve Swan’s Quest, Chapter 1!

See you at 1pm!