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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.
Below is a collection of resources which I have authored, co-authored and collaborated on. All of the resources a freely available for educators to use in their own classrooms or remix as they see fit. Click on the cover art to view the resource.
These resources are freely available Apple’s Book Store.
** These resources will only open via the iTunes U app on your iPad.
These resources link to Podcast interviews in iTunes where I have spoken about my work.
** These resources will only open via the Swift Playgrounds app on your iPad.
