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.
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.
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.
