Welcome to Day Eighteen of the 2020 Appvent Calendar!  In today’s post Junichi will explain how Swift Playgrounds can be used in the teaching of coding and other skills.

Swift Playgrounds is one of the best applications for teaching coding. This month the global community once again celebrated the importance of learning how to code.

My school in Japan participated in the Hour of Code event and I used Swift Playgrounds during my English lessons as can be seen on my Twitter account below:

As many of our readers will know, Swift Playgrounds can be used for not only teaching coding but also for teaching thinking skills and problem-solving in general.  In fact, it can be adapted to any learning process.  This is what inspired me to incorporate it into my English lessons.  

Most people who have already met the app will have enjoyed developing their coding skills by moving a cute character byte to accomplish a variety of given goals.  This process helps students think and articulate how to solve different problems.

However, beyond these tasks, there are so many other options available in the app.  There are also Challenges, Starting Points and content from third-party publishers.

Every Saturday night, I join a Swift Coding Club with ADE friends in Japan. Last week, our task was to make a game called “Never say 30.” The rule was simple. We had to count up by between 1-3 each time a person said 30.  We had to resolve the process of the game step by step and to solve this we created a flowchart for how to code this program in Swift Playgrounds. 

This training is beneficial for teachers because if we know how to think computationally, then we will be able to revise our teaching styles and add those teaching methods into our regular classes.  The link below is a sample of the code we co-created:

https://www.evernote.com/shard/s40/client/snv?noteGuid=a40693e6-e3cd-4814-8c7d-09f5b7f7fe3c&noteKey=247119d91fa3c397&sn=https%3A%2F%2F