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Out of curiosity, how many of those teenagers come from impoverished circumstances? I find a certain irony in schools teaching things like iOS development to de
by ben_jones 10y ago
Out of curiosity, how many of those teenagers come from impoverished circumstances? I find a certain irony in schools teaching things like iOS development to demographics which very likely cannot responsibly afford an apple computer or even an iPhone.
I still think it's a good thing, just that it brings a different perspective to the "walled-garden" argument against many brands/services as well as tech education as a whole.
- GuiA 10y agoMost of them do. We teach basic Ruby and Swift (with UIKit), certainly not "iOS development". The workshop is only over 3 days, with some homework. The goal is not to make them the developers of tomorrow - just to expose them to programming, and light CS thinking. They don't get these opportunities at school. If they don't like it, well hey at least they tried. If they like it, then great! They have discovered a new passion they might have not found otherwise. We've been doing this for a few years now, and many of them (about 40%) have gone on to study CS or something related in college; of those, a fair number also got the motivation to go to college partly because it'd allow them to study CS. We very much emphasize the fact during the workshop that if they understand the basics (variables, loops, functions, etc.) then they can learn any language. A big part of the pedagogy is encouraging them to try things, fail, use Stack Overflow, etc. Gender split is basically 50/50, a fair mix of black/hispanic/asian kids with the few white kids sprinkled in. All that said, a fair amount of them do have iPhones.
- jahewson 10y agoYou can pick up an iPhone 5c on eBay for under $150.