I developed this mBot Swift Cheatsheet to assist students as they unpack the functionality of the mBot. The cheatsheet shows explains how the basic sensors work as well as giving them the basic syntax to get their mBot moving.
To celebrate my Geometry with Swift Playgrounds course reaching over 31,000 subscribers I have created a a Geometry with Swift Playground Cheatsheet.
One of the most exciting things which game out of the World Wide ADE Institute in Austin, Texas this year was a collaborative project. Several teachers were interested in the idea of using Swift Playgrounds (or coding in general) in their classrooms, however, they were not sure how it would fit with their subject or were unable to make relevant resources.
On November 2018, Apple announced an update to Pages which allowed publishing directly to the Book Store without the use of iBooks Author. While the functionality is excellent, I found there is no way to change version numbers which causes an error when pushing updates via iTunes Producer. This article explains how to fix the error.
Apple has recently released Coding Club Kits through Apple Teacher. The kits contain a huge range of resources to help you get your Coding Club up and running. I’ve had a huge amount of success running Coding Club’s across numerous schools. I’ve found that its a great way to identify and engage students who you may not previously have the opportunity to interact with through classroom teaching. This is particularly important if you’re in a technology integration role with limited teaching responsibilities.
Over the Black Friday sales I bought myself the 360Fly HD Camera to start experimenting with creating my own Virtual Reality content. One of my students asked if it would be possible to embed 360 degree photos into Swift Playgrounds.
While presenting last weekend, I was inspired by a presenter who was pulling earthquake data from the United States Geological Survey, an activity which is showcased in Unit 5 of Intro to App Development. This chapter deep dives into Closures and Extensions, as well as, showing how to decode JSON feeds. I then extended this idea to plot the month’s most significant Earthquakes using MapKit.
I have introduced this project as a means to introduce students to Machine Learning terminology as you gain an understanding of the Machine Learning toolsets. Students don’t need to use any mathematics, you certainly don’t need to know how to write compilers and you don’t need to write an algorithm to use the classifier.
For this particular challenge my students were let loose on Makeblock’s Neuron explorer kit. For those who are unfamiliar, the Neuron explorer kit contains a range of colour coded programmable blocks which can be used in any number of combinations.
The students who chose to develop their Space Invaders project in Swift Playgrounds were also able to experiment with developing their own Sprites using Keynote.
I developed this mBot Swift Cheatsheet to assist students as they unpack the functionality of the mBot. The cheatsheet shows explains how the basic sensors work as well as giving them the basic syntax to get their mBot moving.
To celebrate my Geometry with Swift Playgrounds course reaching over 31,000 subscribers I have created a a Geometry with Swift Playground Cheatsheet.
One of the most exciting things which game out of the World Wide ADE Institute in Austin, Texas this year was a collaborative project. Several teachers were interested in the idea of using Swift Playgrounds (or coding in general) in their classrooms, however, they were not sure how it would fit with their subject or were unable to make relevant resources.
On November 2018, Apple announced an update to Pages which allowed publishing directly to the Book Store without the use of iBooks Author. While the functionality is excellent, I found there is no way to change version numbers which causes an error when pushing updates via iTunes Producer. This article explains how to fix the error.
Apple has recently released Coding Club Kits through Apple Teacher. The kits contain a huge range of resources to help you get your Coding Club up and running. I’ve had a huge amount of success running Coding Club’s across numerous schools. I’ve found that its a great way to identify and engage students who you may not previously have the opportunity to interact with through classroom teaching. This is particularly important if you’re in a technology integration role with limited teaching responsibilities.
Over the Black Friday sales I bought myself the 360Fly HD Camera to start experimenting with creating my own Virtual Reality content. One of my students asked if it would be possible to embed 360 degree photos into Swift Playgrounds.
While presenting last weekend, I was inspired by a presenter who was pulling earthquake data from the United States Geological Survey, an activity which is showcased in Unit 5 of Intro to App Development. This chapter deep dives into Closures and Extensions, as well as, showing how to decode JSON feeds. I then extended this idea to plot the month’s most significant Earthquakes using MapKit.
I have introduced this project as a means to introduce students to Machine Learning terminology as you gain an understanding of the Machine Learning toolsets. Students don’t need to use any mathematics, you certainly don’t need to know how to write compilers and you don’t need to write an algorithm to use the classifier.
For this particular challenge my students were let loose on Makeblock’s Neuron explorer kit. For those who are unfamiliar, the Neuron explorer kit contains a range of colour coded programmable blocks which can be used in any number of combinations.
The students who chose to develop their Space Invaders project in Swift Playgrounds were also able to experiment with developing their own Sprites using Keynote.
This example shows how students can very easily show satellite imagery of Indonesia and then plot points of interest such as the epicentre for recent earthquakes in Lombok.
Recently one of our Year 9 students chose to create an animated sculpture entirely in Virtual Reality using the Tilt Brush software. This has given new insights to what is possible with Virtual Reality and how staff and students will utilise this exciting technology.
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.
