Swift Playgrounds from Apple

At the dawn of the personal computing era, Apple dominated with their Apple II computer introducing an entire generation at school to the wonders of computing and software.

An entire learning ecosystem evolved around the computer Apple built.

That was instrumental in creating a context in which an entire generation grew up using computers as tools for work and play.

One could say, that the entirety of today was probably built on those foundations.

Maybe tomorrow will be built on a new product released yesterday by Apple.

Introduced by an impressive nine year old on stage, Swift Playgrounds lets children or children at heart learn to code on their iPads.

Apple CEO Tim Cook when introducing it said that he believed that code should be taught as a second language at schools and they were introducing Swift Playgrounds to help make it so.

Sure there are other initiatives out there, but this kind of attention and focus from a powerful and coherent ecosystem has the ability to make a huge difference to demystifying code for millions.

In the developing world and a country like South Africa, it has enormous potential to broaden the bell curve of kids who are learning to participate in the future.

After all, they already know the basic skills of using the hardware – swipe, pinch, touch, tap. And our brains are all the same!

For more coverage of our visit to WWDC: wwdc.immedia.co.za