According to The Chicago Tribune, starting this spring more Chicago Public School students will have a new language to learn: the one spoken by iPhone apps and Apple’s iOS operating system.
Apple CEO, Tim Cook, told USA TODAY that the company, in the New Year, will partner with Chicago school system officials to teach the coding language Swift in city classrooms and through after-school coding clubs in a school district.
Chicago has more than 450,000 elementary, high school and junior college students in total. According to Apple officials, this idea would mark the company’s largest effort to introduce the coding class to students yet. The school system is the biggest district, one in which about 84% of the K-12 student body is black or Latino, where Apple has pushed its coding education program.
“We’ve fundamentally concluded instead of just waiting and going into the four-year school system and seeing how many women and minorities are graduating in coding, which is abysmal, that we had to back up,” Cook said in an interview. “(We have to go) all the way into elementary school and junior high school in order to fundamentally change the diversity.”
Apple officials have not commented on how much they’ve spent on their Everyone Can Code program.
Source: usatoday.com
