Apple’s New Elementary School App Design
October 6, 2021It’s time to extend Apple’s coding curriculum offerings to elementary school students and teachers with the release of Everyone Can Code Early Learners, an activity guide that extends its coding curriculum resources from kindergarten to college. Apple’s one-hour Inclusive App Design activity is another option for introducing students to the world of coding and app development. The updated Schoolwork app supports exit tickets and allows teachers to access it from their personal devices.
“The ability to code and design apps is essential knowledge – these skills will help students think critically and creatively, whether or not they end up becoming app developers, said Susan Prescott, Apple’s director of education and enterprise marketing”. “Apple now has coding resources for kids from kindergarten all the way up to college, giving them the ability to design inclusive and accessible apps. Teachers and students can get a head start on building apps by exploring our resources and support for educators”.
Apple’s instructional designers create applications using Swift, Apple’s open-source programming language used by professional developers to build some of the world’s most popular apps. Apple’s Everyone Can Code Early Learners supplemented Apple’s Everyone Can Code curriculum and Swift Playgrounds app to help educators and families introduce coding to students in their early years, when they’re starting to develop computational thinking skills.
This October 9-24, and December 6-12, Apple is inviting educators and their students to take part in an introductory Inclusive App Design activity. This new lesson from Apple can help educators guide students through a one-hour lesson to turn their ideas into apps that are inclusive and accessible.
By identifying problems they care about, and then planning, prototyping, and developing creative solutions, students are prepared to become the innovators of tomorrow. App design helps students think critically about what makes a good app and how they can make it inclusive for others.
The Schoolwork app will also receive support for an educational survey tool known as exit tickets, which allows teachers to quickly create questions to gauge student comprehension, reactions, and engagement. New enhancements to the Schoolwork setup experience will allow teachers to create Schoolwork accounts for students without involving IT staff.
Families and educators can download the free Early Learners guide right now at apple.co/code-early. To celebrate Europe Code Week, it is being released in English, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Norwegian, Spanish, and Swedish, and we will add more languages soon. The Inclusive App Design activity is now available in the Apple Teacher Learning Center, while the Schoolwork app is available in beta through AppleSeed for IT.
