Swift Playgrounds adding drones, robots
Apple said Thursday that its Swift Playgrounds app will expand the ways it teaches students how to code, giving people the ability to program and control drones, robots and musical instruments.
The Cupertino company is working with several businesses, including Lego, Parrot Education and Sphero, to bring these new options to Swift Playgrounds on Monday. The coding education app was introduced for the iPad last year, one of the few surprises at Apple’s annual developer conference. The app teaches young people how to use Swift, Apple’s programming language for iPhone and iPad apps.
“We think coding is part of today’s society, whether you want to grow up to be a software developer or understand the world around you,” said Susan Prescott, vice president of product marketing for apps, markets and services. Apple has the “credibility to create curriculum to engage kids in coding,” she said.
Apple introduced the Swift language in 2014. Today, roughly 250,000 apps on its App Store are written in Swift. Most of the rest are written in Objective-C, an older language that some developers view as more difficult to learn.
Analysts say Apple is pushing Swift Playgrounds to reach potential customers at an earlier age and get them to use Apple products. Once the preferred device for U.S. classrooms, iPads lost their lead in 2014 to Chromebook, a laptop that uses Google software and is available in cheaper versions than the Apple tablet. While Swift Playgrounds won’t instantly reverse that trend, the app could help expose younger people to Apple.
“Getting consumers to interact with Apple in a whole bunch of different ways helps develop that positive relationship early,” said Jennifer Kent, a director of research at Parks Associates, a Dallas research and consulting firm.
“I believe this is a strategic move for Apple.” Polina Vorms, a research analyst with Futuresource Consulting
Already, Apple has a strong following among younger consumers. Last year, 39 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds in the U.S. purchased an Apple product, compared with the 23 percent who bought a Samsung device, according to Parks Associates. Samsung is the leading maker of devices that run Google’s Android operating system, the chief rival to Apple’s iOS software.
But iPad sales have declined. In Apple’s fiscal second quarter, the number of iPads sold dropped 13 percent to 8.9 million compared with a year earlier.
Apple says that more than 1 million people have logged onto Swift Playgrounds to learn how to code. The app, designed for middle-school students, teaches people how to code by guiding characters through a mythical world. But now it can do much more. At a demonstration for reporters, Swift Playgrounds was used to move a spherical robot on the ground and flip a drone in the air. A different robot was even able to sway to the beats of “Gangnam Style” through programming on Swift Playgrounds.
“I believe this is a strategic move for Apple,” said Polina Vorms, a research analyst with Futuresource Consulting in the United Kingdom.
She added that Swift Playgrounds connecting with robots “will definitely be more exciting to students.”
This year, Apple reduced the starting cost of iPads for schools to $299, making it more competitive with Chromebooks that range $200 to $300, Vorms said. Her firm said that just 19 percent of mobile devices shipped to K-12 schools in the U.S. use Apple’s operating system, compared with 58 percent that use Google’s. Chromebooks also work with coding education apps like Scratch that can be used to program robots.
Kelly Croy, a teacher at Oak Harbor Middle School in Washington, said he is excited to have his students use Swift Playgrounds to program robots.
“Now they get to use that same language that operates their phones ... to interact with robots in the physical world,” Croy said at a press event held at Apple. “It’s a game changer for my kids.”