MDeC recently announced for the introduction of coding at an early age for Malaysian students, in fact the idea will now turn factual under the new education blueprint. The Education Ministry has embraced the suggestion and beginning 2017, selected schools in the country will be adopting ICT especially in coding, in primary schools.

For those preparing for the change and welcome the new subject, they could sandbox on the a new app by Apple. Swift Playgrounds is an innovative new iPad app from Cuppertino that makes learning to code easy and fun, which is now available on the App Store. With Swift Playgrounds, real coding concepts are brought to life with an interactive interface that allows students and beginners to explore working with Swift, the easy-to-learn programming language from Apple used by professional developers to create apps.

The Swift Playgrounds app is approachable enough for students with no previous programming experience to begin exploring key coding concepts, but also powerful enough for skilled programmers to experiment and express their creativity using Swift.

According to Craig Federighi a senior VP at Apple Software Engineering department, more than 100 schools around the world have already added the app in their curriculum. The app includes Apple-developed programming lessons that guide students through a series of challenges and puzzles to guide three on-screen characters through an immersive graphical world as they learn core coding concepts, like issuing commands, creating functions, performing loops and using conditional code and variables. Apple will also regularly release new standalone challenges so users can continue learning new skills.

Swift Playgrounds also features built-in templates that users can modify and build on to create their own programs with graphics and touch interactions. They can then share their creations with friends using Mail or Messages or even by posting to the Web. And since it uses real Swift code, projects can be exported directly to Xcode and ultimately be turned into full-fledged iOS and Mac apps.

The app is already available in App Store for free and can run on iOS 10.