Swift on Microcontrollers! Do You Teach Electronics / Engineering?

Posted on September 12, 2023 by in Teaching & Learning This post is public.

Hi Friends! This CrowdSupply effort is trying to put Swift on microcontrollers:

https://www.crowdsupply.com/madmachine-limited/swiftio-playground

I currently teach both SwiftUI app dev (zero to full stack), and electronics coding. For the electronics course (Physical Computing - it's the class I presented a Showcase on at #ADE2023 - I use CircuitPython, which is a much better choice than Arduino or MicroPython, but Swift would be WAY better. I very much hope we see Swift on more platforms. It's such a better language, both for teaching, as well as for writing solid, less error-prone code. If there's anything we can do to encourage Apple or the community at large to expand Swift, I'd love to see the shappen. I've backed the project & very much hope to produce some learning videos once I get my hands on it. It's a bit pricey compared to some of the other alternatives, but here's hoping that there may be some open-source Swift efforts like CircuitPython (currently on over 300 boards) at some point in the future.

And if you do teach electronics, it'd be great to connect. Although I teach at a university (Boston College), my classes assume no advance coding experience. I share all my flipped-class lessons online (see below). Hope to turn both courses into supplemental iBooks, soon, as my "One Best Thing", but I also write an Information Systems textbook for business majors & have an update due for this, first. I will be contributing more, soon, though. And thanks to all who are contributing their awesomeness! So inspiring!

Prof. John Gallaugher - Boston College

SwiftUI: https://bit.ly/prof-g-swiftui

CircuitPython: https://bit.ly/circuitpython-tutorials

And you can find Keynote slides with lessons, challenges, and solutions in the open Google Drive for both of these courses at https://gallaugher.com. There are littlerally hundreds of videos in the two playlists above, and more on my channel. Dig in & if you use this material in your class, LMK, and I'll send you some stickers:

Sticker that says "Make Something Awesome" with a stylized smiling gear & an LED light image.

Tagged in: Swift, Coding

Learn to Program Using SwiftUI to Build Apps - A Zero to Full Stack University Course

All "flipped class" videos for my Boston College course designed to take students who haven't taken a collegiate programming course from zero throu...

Develop in Swift

Learn how to help high school and higher education students explore designing and building a fully functioning app of their own.

Zero-to-Full Stack SwiftUI Course Lessons + Keynote Online

Hi Friends, I was recently named an ADE so I figured I'd share material I use in the SwiftUI course I teach at Boston College. The class is open to...