Swift Playgrounds

A year ago, at the beginning of the first lockdown we started with Swift playgrounds at home on the iPad to teach our 10 year old son Merijn a bit of coding. I had looked at it earlier but then it wasn’t available yet in Dutch. Last year it was and with a lot of time on his hands I figured it was a good time to introduce him to some basic coding concepts in a playful way. It hasn’t been a terrific success I must say. Sitting down and concentrating isn’t his favourite pastime. And although this first playground only covers basics I can see some of the logic is quite challenging for a 10 year old not yet used to programming in a programmatic way. But over the past year he has managed to finish all of the first playground except the final module which puts it all together. I have been playing along just to help him out when he has questions and to guide him a bit. One drawback of the system is that it seems to be a bit power hungry and it drains the battery on my iPad fast. So I was happy to see that Swift Playgrounds also exists on the Mac. I stumbled across it after finally installing Catalina some time ago. What is really neat is that you can start on an exercise on your iPad and pick it up on your Mac where you where (or the other way around). I prefer to program and type on a real keyboard so having Swift available on my Mac is nice. I just finished the first playground so I will now ‘push’ Merijn a little bit to finish it as well. He is almost there, maybe one more hour to go.