Apple launches coding camps for kids in its retail stores

I took my kid to one of these last year. It was fairly useless. They drag around little action-icons into a list to make an animated character move around and do stuff. My 11-year-old was bored stiff.<p>Edit: PS the Apple Store employee who ran this thing (he was a very nice guy) admitted he had zero coding experience himself

A few years back my daughter went to movie camp at the Apple Store. It was really well done and they taught the kids all about making movies, how to edit, and at the end they had a big screening of all the movies the kids in the class made for all the parents. She even got a nice apple t shirt and usb keychain.<p>Glad to see they are now expanding it to coding.

It seems like a lot of folks don&#x27;t give Tim Cook enough credit in the post-Steve Jobs world for a lot of the philanthropic work Apple has done for education (as well as for the LGBTQ community.) Kudos to them for this initiative - and I&#x27;ll be excited if this expands to adults at some point.

I am pretty surprised by the general lack luster comments bordering on negativity here. Personally, I think it is great to see a major retailer take even a misguided stab at improving child tech education which has quickly fallen behind demand (in America).<p>Do I think the approach is more than a little bit wrong? Sure, GUI programming a non-useful task wouldn&#x27;t be my choice.<p>Would I prefer a more robust longer-term program? Absolutely.<p>Does this fall well short of actually being useful&#x2F;addressing the original problem? More than likely.<p>But despite of all that, I would much rather have Apple try this and hopefully improve on the offering pending demonstrated interest than not have it at all.

Ironically, I sometimes fear Apple would be the harbinger of programming&#x27;s death, what with how much can be done via consumer-friendly app and touch-screens. It didn&#x27;t help hearing about OSX becoming macOS, which would be well in line with a dystopian future in which the only people who need to know about plaintext and file systems are the full-time Apple programmers.<p>But this sounds like a great initiative...and also, one that seems to be nearly all upside for Apple. Great PR, good benefit to society, increased buzz at the brick and mortar stores, and the cost of running these camps seem like it would be more than paid for by kids who are not only buying the programmable peripherals (anyone have experience hacking the Sphero?), but Apple products for all of their coding lives.

I remember going to Apple Camp as a kid (around 2006). At the time, they had different sessions teaching kids how to &quot;edit movies&quot;, &quot;make music&quot;, &quot;build websites&quot; etc. They were showing us how to use iMovie, GarageBand, and iWeb.<p>After attending those camps, I so badly wanted a Mac.

As much as I want to cheer this it leaves me with the sour thought that modern Apple robbed kids of the joys the original Apple afforded. Growing up with the Apple II+ in our home I was programming from an early age because that was the primary activity you could do with one right out of the box. Look at the loops you have to run through to unleash the power of the iPad. Developer accounts, EULAs, closed APIs. Where is the modern equivalent of computer clubs where most members could code or at least were interested?

I find this program ironic since Apple locks down iDevices pretty hard - their App Store rules prohibit coding[1] on iPhones &amp; iPads. If anyone were to attempt to make an interpreter&#x2F;port Scratch or Python to iOS, the app would not be approved.<p>1. §3.3.2 An Application may not download or install executable code. Interpreted code may only be used in an Application if <i>all scripts, code and interpreters are packaged in the Application</i> and not downloaded.

People often suggest that we should be teaching programming in primary&#x2F;elementary school to kids.<p>I&#x27;m skeptical that that would encourage kids to code. This opinion is particularly espoused by politicians who can&#x27;t code but want to be seen as technically progressive.<p>I think part of loving programming is discovering it on your own and seeking it out. Events&#x2F;Sessions like this and CoderDojo that we have here in Ireland are more effective at evangelising kids to code because it endows a greater sense of autonomy to the individual that what you get in a classroom and I think thats a more conducive environment to encourage coding.

That&#x27;s a really good idea to make the future developers learn the Apple platform. But Microsoft had a better one; to buy Minecraft and add it to Visual Studio.

Microsoft already does one day events in their stores. My SO who&#x27;s an elementary school teacher took her class to one of them.

I like Apple&#x27;s initiative but why use a third party application instead of their Swift Playground? It seems more appropriate and based on what&#x27;s shown on WWDC, it&#x27;s not that hard to learn.<p>This is a possible sign that Tynker can be bought by Apple soon to be integrated with Swift Playground.

It would be more useful to teach them an ultra-simple language like BASIC (there was an article posted about it recently -- the early DOS version -- still being the best language&#x2F;IDE to teach kids), or even a stripped down version of javascript. Imagine the advantages in pure thought that would come for those kids that are able to grok functional programming at age 8?

Can I do the coding camp? I&#x27;d like to learn...

Does anyone else ever wonder if this is part of a long term strategy to reduce costs by inflating the pool of developers? Corporations can think long term.

for a second i thought it said walmart in the beginning

Why aren&#x27;t there any white people on the pictures?

I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s necessarily fair to call this program &quot;philanthropic.&quot; It&#x27;s teaching kids how to use proprietary and commercial software, like iMovie, iBooks, and Tynker, when completely free alternatives exist like Blender and Scratch.<p>This is essentially building a new generation of future Apple customers.

Why surprised? This is HN

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