Apple SWIFT Arrives at Chapel Hill High’s
Academy of Information Technology
Chapel Hill High School is one of only three public high schools in North Carolina to introduce a new course, “App Development with Swift,” this year. The free 45-lesson, full-year course is available through iBooks Store, but it’s taught as part of the Academy of Information Technology by academy director, Garrison Reid.
For the Swift launch at Chapel Hill High, Mr. Reid opened the class to students across the high school grade levels, so they’ve enrolled with varying degrees of prior knowledge and experience in coding. The current class has 15 students, and they work both independently and collaboratively to cover the Apple-designed lessons which help students learn Swift application design and then how to code, test and deploy apps to prepare them for internships and future jobs. Tonia Aldridge, regional Apple representative said, “The Chapel Hill-Carrboro CTE department has been a leader with Swift.”
The call for all students to learn coding is gaining momentum nationwide. Ali Partovi, co-founder of Code.org said, “We feel that coding is the new American Dream and should be available to everybody, not just a lucky few.”
"It seems that people who are not computationally literate will have to rely on others to help them navigate their lives, " writes Annette Vee, author of Coding Literacy: How Computer Programming is Changing Writing. “Because programming is intertwining with writing, it’s changing what it means to be literate in the 21st century. Computer programming is re-coding literacy.”
During a recent day in Mr. Reid’s Swift class, students followed along as their teacher led them through an exercise in combining variables of a common theme using structures. The atmosphere is relaxed but focused as students look from their own screens to the overhead screen that illustrates the steps.
By the time the course wraps up next spring, students will have created Apple’s sample apps as well as apps of their own design. All students will gain critical job skills, as well as developing a “computational mentality.”
As the feeder school into the IT Academy at Chapel Hill High, McDougle Middle School now offers a semester-long course on coding for eighth graders, taught by Anderson Wyatt. The introductory Apple Swift course uses the Playground app and the curriculum "Learn to Code 1." Mr. Wyatt will integrate activities that he designs, as well as those that are provided in the "Everyone Can Code" teacher guide. “Each student has an iPad that's assigned to them and they will use them to work through 'Learn to Code 1,'" he said.
The exercises and lessons in “Learn to Code” aim to demonstrate basic concepts through topics like “Intro to Debugging” and “World-Building.” Quizzes are framed as Playground Labs, so it’s easy for students to lose sight of the complexity and rigor, and focus instead on the fun.
Ben Kern, a freshman in Mr. Reid’s class, has been interested in computers his entire life. He smiled broadly as he said, “I can definitely see doing this as my career.”
Another freshman, Chloe Elbogen, first studied computing as a sixth grader, the only girl in her class. Although she participated in the program Girls Who Code, Chloe said, “This is the first real time I’ve sat down to make whatever I want…this is learning a new language. I really enjoy coding.”
“This is an ongoing effort to introduce programming concepts to CHCCS students,” Mr. Reid said. “This is a recognized gap by industry partners on our advisory board, but also at the state and national levels.”
For more information about the need for employees with higher level programming and coding skills, see the website Promote Computer Science:
https://code.org/promote/nc. Currently, the site indicates that there are more than 15,000 unfilled computing jobs in North Carolina.
