For today’s session we’re going to show you a good setup for following along with our live stream or videos and coding at the same time. We’ll also recap a little bit about functions.
The beginning of the video will help you get set up, so long as you have an iPad and an internet connection.
If you prefer to read your instructions, yesterday’s post will show you where to go to get Swift Playgrounds and Everyone Can Code Puzzles, the ebook we’re using.
Today’s Session @ 1pm Irish time
For today’s session we’re going to walk through some more lessons about commands: how to use them, how to figure out when they’re not doing what we expected, or debugging. We’ll look at strategies for solving puzzles, which is a lot of what programming is.
So tune in, grab your iPad, and spend a little time with me, coding!
In Part One of this special Coding at Home series we looked at our new app: Learning Variables.
In Part Two we looked at the Swift Playgrounds we’ve developed at The Code Hub and how to get them on your Mac or iPad.
For Part Three we checked out one of my favorite playgrounds, Text Adventure.
Code with Me
Now we’re going to try a slightly different tack.
Starting this week we’re going to hold live coding sessions to teach you about coding.
Since I use iPads in my class, I’ll be taking advantage of those devices for the course. They don’t necessarily have to be spring chickens, either, so long as you can install Swift Playgrounds.
Swift Playgrounds is available on the App Store for free. Just have a search for “swift playgrounds” and tap on the GET button.
And that’s it, that’s all you’ll need for the first few lessons.
If you’re following along at home, and all of you should be (at home, that is), we’re going to start with material from Apple’s excellent Everyone Can Code curriculum.
We’ll be working from the student guide, but if you’re a parent (or a kid teaching another kid, your parent, or your pets), the teacher guide gives some great suggestions about how to teach coding, with varying levels of difficulty.
So hopefully I’ll see you at 1pm, Irish time, today.
In Part One of this special Coding at Home series we looked at our new app: Learning Variables.
In Part Two we looked at the Swift Playgrounds we’ve developed at The Code Hub and how to get them on your Mac or iPad.
Text Adventure!
For part three, we’re going to look at the Text Adventure playground we’ve developed, in particular. This is one of my personal favorites, because it reminds me of my own start in programming; BASIC, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy interactive fiction, and MOOs.
The playground is designed to take advantage of a little library I wrote that models a story with a number of rooms, through which your protagonist navigates. The goal is to use coding to be a little bit creative and get the kids (and adults) telling stories and using code as a means to and end, rather than the end, itself.
Getting the Playground
To start, go grab the playground from the Code Hub’s Playgrounds feed (explained in Part Two). You’ll see the Text Adventure playground front and center now:
More Playgrounds: Getting the Text Adventure playground
Telling Stories
Once you have that in Playgrounds, you can open it and you’ll see the introduction to the whole shebang.
Pretty self-explanatory so far, right?
We don’t have to write any code at all, just hit the “Run My Code” button and off we go!
I won’t post any spoilers here, but the stories are gripping, edge-of-your-seat kind of stuff.
Once you’ve exhausted all the possibilities in the first story (and that might happen pretty quick), you can hit the Next button to move on.
The playground is designed to dip you into coding your own story gently and follows a progression that looks like this:
You can skip around if you like, of course, but I try to introduce concepts that will introduce you to code and the features of the Story library as we go. So try it out. If you come up with a particularly cool twist or story of your own, use the built-in tools to record your story.
From the three dots in the menu, select Record Movie to start capturing your story.
Full Screen
One last tip, the stories work best in fullscreen mode. You can enter fullscreen by tapping on the divider between your code and the story view.
Drag to the left, and the story view will take up the full screen. To get out of full screen you’ll just tap on the left side of the screen (you might see the faint arrow on that edge).
In Part One, we looked at a relatively painless way to talk about and experience variables.
Swift Playgrounds from The Code Hub
One of the other little tweaks we’ve just shipped is an update to our Text Adventure Playground. But let’s start with a little (re)introduction of Playgrounds, for the uninitiated.
If you didn’t already know, The Code Hub has a suite of Swift Playgrounds for use in the iPad (and now Mac!) Playgrounds app. When you download Playgrounds, which is a free download, you’ll see a bar along the bottom of the screen with the headline “More Playgrounds.”
More Playgrounds!
Apple provides an excellent array of playgrounds authored to teach you how to code, to learn augmented reality development. Or some innovative uses of content and code like the Cipher playground. The app is free, as are playgrounds you can download from Apple and third parties (like The Code Hub).
But if you are on an iPad and go to https://thecodehub.ie/playgrounds/ you can click on the Subscribe button to add The Code Hub’s suite of playgrounds to the app. Alternatively, on the Mac version of Playgrounds you can scroll to the bottom of the additional playgrounds and you’ll see the option to enter a subscription URL:
Enter in www.thecodehub.ie/playgrounds/feed.json and you’ll be good to go. You’ll see a confirmation dialog like this:
And, once you hit Subscribe, you’ll see a list of our playgrounds.
Right now, the 18th of March, 2020, we have six. I’ll try and touch on each of them in the next few weeks. But for now, you can download any of them onto your device and play around with them. There is a bit of explanatory text for each of the playgrounds, so you won’t be left completely at sea.
It helps to have a bit of Swift knowledge, but that, too, I’ll be touching on in the coming weeks.
Well, it’s been a long time, but we’re still here, and in fact, we come bearing news.
While we’ve been stuck, pottering around the house, we improved a couple of our learning resources so that you, too, can use these to exercise your coding muscles!
Learning Variables
The first is our app, Learning Variables. We’ve long been using this app in our classrooms to help teach the concept of variables, but now we’ve released it for iPads, iPhones, and the Mac (thanks to Catalyst!).
There are a few built-in stories to start you off. Pick a story, and you’ll see a list of variables to fill in with some hints about what kind of value we’re looking for:
Enter in a few words according to the hint, and you’ll wind up with something like this:
It’s a little goofy exercise that will show students how variables can be used. They can go back and change what they entered and watch the story change. Or they can write their own story. We’ll rip out a few key words and create variables for students to fill in and re-generate their story with their new variable values in place. It’s handiest to have the kids write their own stories and then hand the devices around the classroom (or home) and see what their classmates (or siblings, parents, pets*) do to their stories… but I’d love to hear how you use it in your classroom (or home)!
If you have any requests or bugs, feel free to drop us a line at [email protected] and we’ll see what we can do.
* Please note, pets are terrible at coming up with values for these variables.
I finally made it to CESI Conference, a gathering of educators across Ireland who are doing some inspiring stuff with and for their students. They’ve developed a supportive, engaged community of practice around the use of computers and technology and how they can be applied in teaching. This conference is a crown jewel (along with the CESI*CS meetups run by Dr. Millwood). Last year the beast from the east snowed out the conference and the makeup date fell on a date I just couldn’t make, and I had to back out of my planned talk on Turtle Graphics on the iPad.
Turtle Graphics on the iPad 2018
So I was delighted that this year’s conference theme was “Creativity, Collaboration, and Computers: Practitioner Perspectives” and that I had a good deal to talk about in that space. My talk on using cross-curricular Swift Playgrounds in your classroom is a way to introduce coding in a fun, creative way. Now, I was slightly less delighted when I had to shift my talk from the afternoon to the morning to try and make it back to Dublin for a poetry feis, especially as the shift happened after the schedules were printed, but the CESI staff were super accommodating. They even gave me an extra half an hour for my slot! And the attendees of the workshop were diligent in tracking me down from room to room. Some of them have careers as hunting dogs, should the teacher thing not work out.
Creative Coding
The talk part of the workshop went into my background and how the material for The Code Hub has grown over the years. The most compelling reason for me to start a new project isn’t coding for the sake of coding but it’s most often to solve a problem or scratch an itch I feel acutely, and the goal of the Swift Playgrounds I highlighted was to showcase a variety of problem-solving scenarios that might hook a student’s imagination.
We explored playgrounds related to the visual: turtle graphics, Apple’s Puzzle World and Learn to Code playgrounds.
We looked at a few playgrounds that are more text-based, like the Answers playground from Apple, the Shakespeare insult generator, my own Text Adventure playground, and a cool escape room-like playground from some educators in Spain.
The Cipher playground from Apple deserves a special call-out for its story-telling aspect and most approachable crypto content I think you’ll find anywhere.
We looked at playgrounds that use the iPad sensors like the Augmented Reality and the Sensor Create and Arcade playgrounds from Apple.
Because they’re adding things to or interacting things in the room in which they sit, these are great resources for paired (or more) use. I love the buzz in a classroom when we use these playgrounds as kids are up walking around, showing off the world they’ve superimposed on our own.
I’ll post the slides at some point in the near future, but in the meantime I’ve posted the links to the resources I used at https://www.thecodehub.ie/cesi.
So stop by, grab an iPad and subscribe to a few of the playground feeds listed there and try them out!
It’s been a busy October already at The Code Hub with our October Learn to Code session in full swing and a visit to Harold Boys National School for EU Code Week on Wednesday. Now we have our eyes set on Saturday, the 13th of October, for our sessions at Dalkey Creates, at Harold Boys National School in Dalkey.
Dalkey Creates
We’re running three hour-long sessions at Dalkey Creates from 2-5pm on Saturday.
I’m particularly excited about working during the festival because I think using technology to express ourselves creatively opens up wonderful possibilities. That the festival have allowed us to run coding workshops alongside some amazing writing folks is a real treat and shows a real open mind.
Our box of goodies
We’re going to cater our work to all levels of programmers, from novices who have never coded a line or even heard of coding before to experts who are coding their own games and apps. We’ll explore some of the sensors and functionality of our iPads to place 3D characters (like our beloved Max the Fox, from Apple’s sample code). We’ll play with Sphero’s SPRK+, a little ball of a robot that lights up a room and can make slow shutter art. For all of it we’ll use Swift, which is the same programming language you can use to make apps for your iPhone, iPad, Mac, AppleTV, or Apple Watch.
Coding doesn’t have to just be about STEM, and we’re going to show you its Artsy side on Saturday. Our hope is that we introduce a new generation or two to the creative possibilities where they might have previously just seen a device for consumption.
Max the Fox
Come Visit!
If you’re in Dalkey this weekend, be sure to check out any of the events on around town and then stop on by the Harold Boys school hall, where we’ll be getting creative with code!
And if you aren’t, it’s well worth a trip out on the DART, Dalkey is a gorgeous little village in South Dublin County. You might get a little bit wet with the weather, but then you can always pop by and get dry with an iPad and Swift Playgrounds…
Up Next
Up next for The Code Hub is another EU Code Week event at Loreto National School in Dalkey on Wednesday, and then we’ll be presenting two sessions at the Berlin Swift Educator Summit, put on by Apple on the Friday and Saturday. So if we don’t see you in Dalkey, maybe we’ll run into you in Berlin!
