Color Switch is a popular game with over 125 million downloads worldwide. The game is simple and creates attractive visuals using only simple shapes such as circles, lines and squares that are brightly coloured. We can easily create this game using a "Blank" template from the Starting Points in Swift Playgrounds.
This week our Year 7 Robotics (13 year old) students explored Functions using the mBot and Apple's Swift programming language.
This week I have been working with follow ADE and Author, Paul Hamilton to develop a workflow which will allow students in his Grade 6 class to understand and create their own animation using Keynote's new drawing features and Swift Playgrounds.
Over the past month I have been working with the talented developers at MakeBlock in China to tweak their new template for Coding with mBot. Read more about the improvements to this Swift Playground course.
At Apple's World Wide Developers Conference (WWDC) 2018 it was announced there is now support for third-party subscriptions within Swift Playgrounds. As someone who uses Playgrounds for coursework to match the Australian Digital Technologies Curriculum it is a welcome relief that we can now push updated Playground Books to students.
In the last couple weeks I have tested out the new Makeblock's Codey Rocky in my classroom. I have utilised the mBot extensively and created coursework for Swift Playgrounds so I was excited to see there was a new robot released with similar functionality.
I recently had the privilege of being interviewed for the pilot episode of The Staffroom. The Staffroom produced by Apple Distinguished Educator, Jamie Clark is targeted as an education podcast which take a look into the world of pedagogy.
The mBot is an Arduino based robot which allows for expansion and most importantly interaction with Swift Playgrounds. The manufacturer released the beta of their Swift Playground Book on GitHub, but unfortunately it was incomplete.
Over the past 6 months I have been writing a multi-touch resource to help guide teachers through the growing number of resources available for teaching Swift. I have been writing the book with two fellow ADE's from the other side of the world.
I have recently remixed and reworked a mathematics investigation which was originally written for Scratch with my ex-colleague Jan Honnens . The main purpose of this activity was to showcase the capabilities of Swift Playgrounds and how to bring new life into old resources with multi-touch interactivity to give students the necessary feedback to engage with course material.
Color Switch is a popular game with over 125 million downloads worldwide. The game is simple and creates attractive visuals using only simple shapes such as circles, lines and squares that are brightly coloured. We can easily create this game using a "Blank" template from the Starting Points in Swift Playgrounds.
This week our Year 7 Robotics (13 year old) students explored Functions using the mBot and Apple's Swift programming language.
This week I have been working with follow ADE and Author, Paul Hamilton to develop a workflow which will allow students in his Grade 6 class to understand and create their own animation using Keynote's new drawing features and Swift Playgrounds.
Over the past month I have been working with the talented developers at MakeBlock in China to tweak their new template for Coding with mBot. Read more about the improvements to this Swift Playground course.
At Apple's World Wide Developers Conference (WWDC) 2018 it was announced there is now support for third-party subscriptions within Swift Playgrounds. As someone who uses Playgrounds for coursework to match the Australian Digital Technologies Curriculum it is a welcome relief that we can now push updated Playground Books to students.
In the last couple weeks I have tested out the new Makeblock's Codey Rocky in my classroom. I have utilised the mBot extensively and created coursework for Swift Playgrounds so I was excited to see there was a new robot released with similar functionality.
I recently had the privilege of being interviewed for the pilot episode of The Staffroom. The Staffroom produced by Apple Distinguished Educator, Jamie Clark is targeted as an education podcast which take a look into the world of pedagogy.
The mBot is an Arduino based robot which allows for expansion and most importantly interaction with Swift Playgrounds. The manufacturer released the beta of their Swift Playground Book on GitHub, but unfortunately it was incomplete.
Over the past 6 months I have been writing a multi-touch resource to help guide teachers through the growing number of resources available for teaching Swift. I have been writing the book with two fellow ADE's from the other side of the world.
I have recently remixed and reworked a mathematics investigation which was originally written for Scratch with my ex-colleague Jan Honnens . The main purpose of this activity was to showcase the capabilities of Swift Playgrounds and how to bring new life into old resources with multi-touch interactivity to give students the necessary feedback to engage with course material.
In this course your students will learn the fundamentals of Swift 3 programming, using Geometry as their context for learning. The style of this course mimic "Logo", which is an educational programming language designed in 1967 by Daniel Borrow, Wally Feurzeig, Seymour Papert and Cynthia Soloman.
In this course your students will learn how to create a simple Space Invaders game on your iPad using the Swift Playgrounds application and Swift 3. The project uses very simple logic to detect collisions, but students will also be introduced to Sprite animations and physics which can be extended their knowledge into other projects.
In this course your students will learn how to create a simple Blackjack game on your iPad using the Swift Playgrounds application and Swift 3. Whilst this project doesn't follow strict Blackjack rules it can easily be extended by students if they want to split decks or develop it into an app that can deploy it to their iPads.
Since the release of Swift Playgrounds at WWDC in June 2016 I have been madly learning how to develop playgrounds so that I can utilise them in the courses I teach. This has meant not only learning the markup, but also converting my resources over to Swift 3 with very limited documentation. In this article I would like to share some of what I have learnt from developing these playgrounds and the surrounding course material.
To kick off the start of the term I was asked to present at a neighbouring school on "Online tools to enhance student learning".
We have been having an on-going debate regarding whether or not YouTube content is regarded as “free-to-air” and if it is legal for Teachers to use show archived YouTube clips for offline playback.
The aim of the Tea Road Project was to modify the “pen pal” experience and allow Chinese and Australian students to open a dialogue, thus exposing the students to different cultures through modern mediums.
“Ad astra” is a Latin phrase meaning “to the stars”. This blog post summarises by student-focused session at Slide2Learn 2013, encouraging a positive view of the tablet for senior students who are particularly reluctant to adopt the technology late in their high school journey.
Over the past year I have developed an Essential Educational Application List. One of the biggest mistakes schools can make with their iPad programmes it to overburden students and staff with a device packed with applications which never get used.
The following video explains the concept of ‘workflows’. Due to the limited functionality in some applications it is necessary to use multiple applications to get the desired effect or end result.
