Apple Launches App Development Curriculum for U.S. High School and College Students

Apple today announced a new app development curriculum designed for students who want to pursue careers in the fast-growing app economy. The curriculum comes as a free download from the iBooks Store.

Called "App Development with Swift", the full-year course aims to teach students the elements of app design using Swift, Apple's increasingly popular programming languages. Apple said students who undertake the course will learn to code and design fully functioning apps, gaining critical job skills in software development and information technology in the process.

Beginning in the fall, six community college systems serving nearly 500,000 students across the United States will be among the first to offer the curriculum, according to Apple. Participating colleges include the Alabama Community College System, Columbus State Community College, Harrisburg Area Community College, Houston Community College, Mesa Community College, and San Mateo Community College District.

"We've seen firsthand the impact that coding has on individuals and the US economy as a whole. The app economy and software development are among the fastest-growing job sectors in America and we're thrilled to be providing educators and students with the tools to learn coding," said Tim Cook, Apple's CEO. "Community colleges play a critical role in helping students achieve their dreams, and we hope these courses will open doors for people of all ages and backgrounds to pursue what they love."

Since its launch in 2014, Swift has been consistently promoted by Apple as ideal for kids who are keen to code, with its gentle learning curve demonstrated in Swift Playgrounds, an app that teaches children how to use the language. The new curriculum includes a comprehensive student guide with playground exercises, mini projects and quizzes, as well as a teachers guide with grading rubrics, solutions code and Keynote presentations.

Swift has become one of the most sought-after skills for freelance developers, experiencing more than 200 percent year-on-year growth, according to one study.

Earlier this month, Apple announced the creation of a $1 billion Advanced Manufacturing Fund focused on creating jobs in the US throughout its supply chain. Apple said the new Swift coding curriculum is another example of its commitment to economic development and will help create even more career opportunities for students across the country.

Tags: education, Swift

Top Rated Comments

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keysofanxiety

35 months ago

Whilst I can't help but think of Greendale whenever community colleges are mentioned, this is really great news.

Swift is swiftly becoming an ever more essential programming language and putting it into the hands of as many people as possible, even moreso in a curriculum, will be a hugely positive decision in the long run.

Rating: 6 Votes

wwchris

35 months ago

Here, while you guys are at it go crazy, Apple has lots of instructional books! - https://itunes.apple.com/us/author/apple-education/id939801385?mt=11

Rating: 3 Votes

masochist

35 months ago

Creating apps should be as easy as making a PowerPoint presentation.

Isn't that called Visual Basic?

Rating: 2 Votes

Trillin

35 months ago

I went to the link to Apple's site, thence to the iBooks Store link from Apple's site, and am not finding any new material—especially not a book with the contents in the photos Apple provided. It is unusual for Apple to make announcements so early in the day (it was not even 4 in the morning Apple time when this article was posted); could it be that the material hasn't been published to the iBooks Store yet? Is anyone else able to find the new material? Everything I've been able to find has release dates either in early May or earlier

I found in under the name "Into to App Development with Swift"

I did however use the iBooks App preloaded loaded on MacOS to get it.
But I also tested the way your doing it and it also works for me.

Rating: 2 Votes

roboats

35 months ago

For those that couldn't find the book, this book looks like the right one. The curriculum matches the screenshots.

App Development with Swift by Apple Education
https://itun.es/us/SoKQib.l

Rating: 2 Votes

Flytrap21

35 months ago

Any school curriculum would be wise to steer clear of this and use only technologies that are open and/or standards.

IMO this makes for a nice headline, but it's also really grubby for a corporate entity to try and change school curriculum to get students developing for their proprietary platform.

The only thing any of this should be used for is like a short overview/introduction as one minor part of a curriculum.

I do not know which rock you have been hiding under since Swift came out... but Swift is free (https://github.com/apple/swift), open (https://developer.apple.com/swift/blog/?id=34), multi-platform (https://thenextweb.com/dd/2016/04/07/google-facebook-uber-swift/#.tnw_6yICCXuC and http://www.elementscompiler.com/elements/) and standards based (https://swift.org/about/).

I think that you may be confusing Swift with XCode. The former is a free, open and multi platform application develop language, the latter is an IDE for developing Apple OS (macOS, iOS, watchOS, tvOS) apps. But schools can choose any other Swift IDE, like Elements ('http://www.elementscompiler.com/elements/') which can target your Swift code to generate Android, Windows and iOS apps.

Rating: 1 Votes

radiology

35 months ago

Creating apps should be as easy as making a PowerPoint presentation.

Rating: 1 Votes

PizzaBoxStyle

35 months ago

Swift is open source, but AppKit/UIKit and a lot of other frameworks in that stack aren't. The platform is still proprietary.

No need to be abrasive and make assumptions re: that living-under-a-rock comment. I am very well aware that swift-lang is open source. And I know what Xcode is as it's been installed on all of my Macs since about 2008/2009. But a lot of the rest of the existing stack/frameworks for making apps (producing anything) is not and probably never will be.

As a curriculum designer, why in the hell would you push a skillset of proprietary vendor technologies (frameworks, etc...) on to your students? Especially when there are languages and stacks that are governed by standards bodies and committees and not primarily by a single vendor. It's like we all learned nothing from the Windows days of the 90's and early/mid 2000's about that kind of a thing - sheesh!

Thanks for taking the time to collect all the links, tho. They are very helpful.

Rating: 1 Votes

masochist

35 months ago

Any school curriculum would be wise to steer clear of this and use only technologies that are open and/or standards.

First words on the Swift home page ('https://swift.org') besides the welcome bit: Swift is now open source!

IMO this makes for a nice headline, but it's also really grubby for a corporate entity to try and change school curriculum to get students developing for their proprietary platform.

You mean like Microsoft and Sun (now Oracle) and Adobe and so on have been doing for literally decades? This doesn't refute your argument, but Apple's only doing what every other platform owner has been doing for a very long time. And if you actually go back to the beginnings of Apple, they have always been about education. This is a very logical step for them.

Rating: 1 Votes