Swift Playground Characters Celebrating Computer Science Education Week, I worked with Ms. Rollins' 4th graders to code with Swift Playgrounds on the iPad. The Hour of Code is a nationwide initiative that encourages educators to spend at least one hour programming with students during December. The Swift programming language, created by Apple, is designed to let you see the results of your coding while you are tweaking and working with your code-an amazing feat in the area of programming! Using a technique called Pair Programming, I had students work together to master interactive puzzles starring a fun character named Byte. In Learn to Code 1 & 2, students learn concepts such as commands, debugging, functions, loops, and algorithms-concepts Ms. Rollins was already working on with her classes. After our powerful pairs mastered the Learn to Code 1 Playground, I challenged them to try the Incredible Code Machine. In this Playground, a machine is missing some parts. Our students had to use logic and basic coding skills, like functions and loops, to figure out how to create new parts for the machine based on different inputs and outputs. Even though this is listed as a middle school challenge, our 4th graders did an amazing job! Way to code 4th graders!
