A professional introduction to programming (“coding”) suitable for all ages. Give your kids a huge advantage in life by teaching them the foundational skill of programming which will be more and more important for all of our lives.

This course brings together my 9 years of experience as a Swift engineer where I worked for prestigious companies such as Apple and BMW. Your children will learn professional and university level skills at a much younger age, giving them not only a boost to their future opportunities but their creativity and confidence to solve problems as well.

Programming, or “coding,” is the modern literacy, and even if not everyone is a professional engineer or professional writer, in our modern world everyone should know the basics of coding just as everyone should should know the basics of writing or English. Learning to code helps children learn how to tackle any kind of complex problem by breaking it down into smaller problems. This “problem solving” is useful across all areas of life, as well as the foundation of any engineer’s way of thinking.

Swift is a modern language used by millions of professional engineers around the world both inside and outside of Apple, the world’s most valuable company. Swift is both easy to learn and very powerful, making it an excellent first introduction to programming to children of any age. Students can easily carry their Swift knowledge to learn other languages in the future, such as Python or JavaScript, or connect to devices such as a Microbit or Arduino. Swift has the advantage that students will see the outputs of their work faster than any other language, with visual feedback and actual interfaces, not just staring at lines of text.

Coding is also a wonderful creative outlet, your kids will develop apps they can be proud of and show on their device right away, or even launch on the App Store someday. They will learn problem solving, teamwork, and how to turn ideas from their imagination into real things they can touch and play with on their screen.

Curriculum

Adaptable from 5 to 15 weeks, 1 hour sessions. Review weeks can be adjusted as needed.

  1. Get Started with Apps, Get Started with Code
  2. Learn to Code 1a, variables, functions
  3. Keep Going with Apps, Swift Types
  4. About Me - make your first app
  5. Review
  6. Learn to Code 1b, more fundamentals
  7. Laying out Views, collections, loops
  8. Organizing with Grids, conditional code, optionals
  9. Choose your own Story - second app
  10. Review
  11. Details Pro and Play, design tools
  12. Rock paper scissors - third app
  13. Get Started with Machine learning - improve third app
  14. Claude, AI tools
  15. Review, Personal Project

Two Week Intensive (10 days)

Curriculum adjusted for a “bootcamp” style intensive summer class. Each session is anticipated to be 4-5 hours.

Sources

https://www.swift.org

https://developer.apple.com/swift-playgrounds/

https://detailspro.app/

https://createwithplay.com/

https://claude.ai/login?returnTo=%2F%3F