As admirable and as much as I use play in my own development and learning, there’s a dilemma with play. Papert was an early champion of using computing for learning mathematics by playing with programming. Compressing a bigger theory into an essential point, this theory believes that we learn by discovery, and that play is the best way to discovery.

The school of thought behind Scratch and Logo is tied to the educational theory of constructivism, championed in mathematics and computer science by Seymour Papert. Secondly, they fail to contain critical learning points for modern computing, such as arrays or good programming style. They are limited in their application, and mere toys. Languages like Scratch and its predecessor Logo are not production languages. Constructivismįor a popular school of thought in the learn to code movement, these two cases illustrate my problems. I had one enthusiastic teen who, hearing that Swift was easy, built a table view in Interface builder, but could not get it through his head how to use an array to hold his data. On the other hand, early in ’s existence, I posted one of the first articles online on UITableView and UITableViewController for Swift. That does not built more and better developers. When my 12-year-old nephew took a learn to code camp this summer, he learned in Scratch, built a simple game and then forgot about it, and hasn’t coded since. There’s a big difference between programming and coding, one that some elements in the learn to code world seem to ignore. Apple’s new Swift iPad Playgrounds have brought my problems into focus. I have problems with the learn to code movement.

Apps built in playground