Apple has announced a global expansion of its Swift app development curriculum to more than 20 colleges and universities outside the US, including Australia's largest higher education institution, RMIT University.

The App Development with Swift Curriculum has been designed by Apple engineers and educators to teach college-level students a solid foundation in programming using Swift. It features Xcode tutorials and structured lessons about data types, variables and elements of application design with enough material to be taught across an entire year. It can be seen as the final stage of Apple’s Swift-based Everyone Can Code initiative which spans the educational progression from kindergarten through the first two years of college and is available in Apple’s iBooks.

In the first unit, students learn how to create a ‘flashlight’ app where tapping the screen toggles the background color from white to black. The course includes Swift Playgrounds exercises, homework projects and quizzes as well as a teacher guide with solutions, teaching presentations and grading advice.

The initial rollout of the college-level curriculum, announced in August, was to more than 30 community colleges across the United States. Now it is being taken up internationally.

The Apple Press Release states: 

Now hundreds of thousands of students from around the world gain the opportunity to become proficient in the Swift programming language and build the fundamental skills they need to pursue careers in the booming app economy. 

RMIT University, Australia’s largest higher education institution, is one of the broadest international deployments of the App Development with Swift Curriculum to date. As part of its commitment to improving digital literacy, starting this month RMIT will offer the App Development with Swift curriculum through RMIT Online, and a new vocational course will be taught on campus. RMIT will also offer scholarships for school teachers who want to learn coding, and a free summer school course at RMIT’s City campus will give secondary students the chance to learn the basics of coding.

Mercantec in Denmark, Hogeschool van Arnhem en Nijmegen in the Netherlands, Unitec Institute of Technology in New Zealand and Plymouth University in the UK and also among the more than 20 international universities who will be offering the curriculum to students in the coming year.

More Information

Apple opens Everyone Can Code initiative to students around the world

Everyone Can Code

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