Using industry-standard game libraries (cocos2d/kobold2d) with ARC, a 16 year old would never need to touch reference counting or the CoreFoundation (the except

Using industry-standard game libraries (cocos2d/kobold2d) with ARC, a 16 year old would never need to touch reference counting or the CoreFoundation (the exception is using Box2D physics). It is also not necessary to understand copy, assign, and unsafe_unretained, though it certainly might help in some edge-case situations, with which we would be glad to assist any student developers. And while it is more helpful to know the difference between strong and weak references, that is IMO a very accessible concept.