A couple of times (Protocols & Named Loops ) in the past few days I’ve needed to write and run a couple of tiny C or C++ snippets, and I’ve acutely felt the lack of Swift Playgrounds for it. It occurred to me that Playgrounds has been instrumental in my enjoyment of learning Swift - it’s just a bit magic to grab the closest device and noodle out an idea or to make sure I’ve understood a new concept.
During the week I attended “App Development in Swift Playgrounds” run by Matt Richards with the support of some of the Apple team and hosted by Dr Michelle Ellis . It was aimed a teachers looking at using Playgrounds for digi-tech teaching.
The day included pulling apart one of the Playgrounds apps and rebuilding it - this being an example of a “top-down” approach - starting with a complete app and fiddling around with it - to better engage students. The alternative being a bottom-up approach where lesson one would be “good morning students, this is a variable, it can hold a value, it has a name we can use to refer to the value”.