iPhone and iPad manufacturer Apple Inc. recently announced App Development with Swift, a “new app development curriculum”, with the goal of “[teaching college-aged students the] elements of app design using Swift, one of the world’s most popular programming languages.” (Press release here.)
And Columbus State will be one of the first community colleges to put this curriculum into practice, writes Mary Edwards of The Columbus Dispatch.
According to Ms. Edwards:
Columbus State Community College will be among the first in the nation to use a new [Apple] curriculum ... to teach people to develop phone and tablet applications in [the company’s] Swift programming language.
According to the Dispatch article, Apple chief executive officer Tim Cook is enthusiastic about bringing this program to CSCC.
“We are thrilled,” Cook said ... “We feel that coding should be a required course in our public and private schools around the country.”
In the meantime, Apple is prepared to teach Swift-based coding concepts to kindergartners through college students, with curriculum products developed by its education experts. The one Columbus State will use, aimed at high-school and community-college students, is just the newest piece.
App Development with Swift is designed as a full-year course that can take a student from novice to designing and building an app. But Columbus State likely will pick and choose materials from the course to work into existing app-development classes that are part of its software-development program, said Katie O’Shea, who works in the Office of Academic Affairs to coordinate the multiple ways in which the college works with Apple.
Bringing App Development with Swift to CSCC isn’t an entirely altruistic endeavor on Apple’s part. The Cupertino, California-based technology company also hopes to be the beneficiary of its students’ creations.
As Ms. Edwards writes:
Apple is interested in seeing as many of those apps as possible available on its App Store, as opposed to the rival Google Play store for Android devices. Industry publications say that, as of last year, the App Store had 2.2 million apps and had generated 130 billion downloads. Google Play, by contrast, had 2.8 million apps but only 65 billion downloads.
Click here to read the full article. The App Development with Swift curriculum can also be downloaded for free from the Apple iBooks Store.
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