Santa Fe Community College offers New Mexico K-12 students on-campus STEM experiences, including visiting our Planetarium and Science-on-a-Sphere Theaters. I've introduced a brief introductory Swift coding experience, using "Learn to Code" playgrounds on iPad, that provides a fun, hand-on workshop for students during these visits. We've run it a few times with great feedback from students, teachers, and sponsors, so I thought I'd share what we're doing, with a few tips and tricks that help make it work.
- I use the "Getting Started with Code" Swift Playground on iPad. Best to download it to the devices to run/reset locally, and open the playground to the Intro page. I use AppleTV to share my iPad on a screen for demos. We also use it at the end of the "competition" - see below.
- Organize the group. There's usually a range of ages and coding experience in a group - I usually divide the group based on coding experience, then pair students into teams with more&less experience, and instruct them to switch off the coding role as they progress through the playgrounds
- Walk through the first playground together. I walk them through the virtual world, some of the controls, the "Goal" instructions, and show them how to enter code. We solve it together, everyone debugs and sees the "Congratulations!" dialog when the goal is achieved. We stop there, I let them know how much time we have in the workshop, and we begin a friendly competition to see which team can complete the most chapters in 30-40 minutes.
- Students generally get right into it, readily ask for help when stuck. It helps if sponsors and other teachers are around to coach - even if they know nothing about coding or Swift playgrounds, they can ask questions and signal to me when teams need help. As teams progress, I introduce additional controls to step, run faster, etc.
- When time is up, I display the full list of playground chapters, and we determine which team(s) completed the most. We share their playground & code on AppleTV, and use it as a background for a team(s) photo.
- The end of these workshops can be a bit chaotic, as groups are moving around the campus, but I try to have the teams reset the playground for the next group before they leave!
I'm really impressed with how quickly students engage and work through playgrounds. Check out how far some of these teams got in less than an hour, with no prior Swift or Swift Playgrounds experience!
April 29, 2025
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