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Virtual Reality is pitched to be one of the up and coming trends in education, however, like all aspects of education “Content is King”. Without the content VR Headsets are fated to sit on shelves and grow dusty. With this project I wanted students to not only develop an App using ARKit, but also experiment creating their own VR content.
Over the past few months there have been various updates to both Swift Playgrounds and also the Swift language. I have updated my Geometry course to Swift 5 and given it a fresh look.
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.
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.
Here are additional resources which have been mentioned in previous blog posts.