Apple introduces Swift Playgrounds to teach coding

120 kids under 18 are attending the ongoing WWDC16 in San Francisco. This number might just double or quadruple next year with Swift Playgrounds that was launched on Monday, an official iPhone and iPad app for kids (and adults) to learn how to code with Swift.

Swift, the wildly popular programming language that was first introduced in 2014 is already a smash hit: Over 100,000 apps have started using Swift to build at least some of their code, including Twitter, Uber, and Lyft, not least because Apple purpose-built it to be easy to learn.

And it was boundless affection and appreciation from schools and classrooms that prompted Apple’s new plans for Swift. "We believe it's the absolute best way to teach everyone to code," said Apple CEO Tim Cook. "We believe code should be a required language in all schools."

In an on-stage demo, Apple demonstrated a few Swift Playgrounds lessons, including building a simple emoji-stacking game. The app prompts the user to adjust things like weight and gravity, showing them how a change in the code affects the way the game is built and played.

The app includes a custom iPhone keyboard with commonly-used symbols and functions in Swift, to simplify the learning process.

This dovetails nicely with Apple's broader ambitions for Swift, which it sees as "the major language for the next 20 years of programming in our industry." The announcement had to get wild cheers from the audience at WWDC, which included 350 student developers attending on an Apple-issued scholarship.

Swift Playgrounds will be in public beta in July, and on the iPhone and iPad App Store alongside iOS 10, which comes out in the fall of 2016.