Apple’s Swift Playgrounds and Dash: Coding Comes to Life!

Amid the flurry of Apple announcements in June, we were particularly thrilled about one …

You can program the Dash robot using Apple’s Swift Playgrounds app!

Yes, it’s true — teachers who are familiar with or interested in the Swift programming language can now use Swift Playgrounds to introduce young kids to the wonders of robotics. You can program Dash to react to sound, light up, and move using real Swift code with our new playground in the Swift Playgrounds app — a complete experience for students!

Apple announced on June 1st that their free Swift Playgrounds app (V1.5) includes an exciting new way to learn to code using robots, drones, and musical instruments. With Swift Playgrounds, children can begin grasping the fundamentals of text-based coding with Apple’s Swift code, a powerful and intuitive programming language created by Apple for building apps. With our new playground in the Swift Playgrounds app, kids can see their code play out in real time, in the real world, with our Dash robot — true hands-on learning!

With over 1 million adults and kids already using Swift Playgrounds, we’re excited to introduce a new playground lesson called “Dash,” which contains seven sequenced coding challenges (found in the Accessories tab of the updated Swift Playgrounds app). Each lesson invites kids to program Dash’s motion, lights, sounds, and sensors with embedded hints to encourage kids along the way, scaffolding their understanding of coding fundamentals.

In addition to the lessons, kids can choose the Dash “template,” which provides a sandbox-like environment for them to experiment and iterate by writing Swift code to program Dash. For more advanced programming, kids can use the built-in iOS frameworks like UIKit to connect Dash to iPad gestures, gyroscope, or the camera.

We invite you all to share your clever Swift + Dash activities in our Lesson Library. Download the free Swift Playgrounds app (V1.5; best with iOS 10.3.2 or later) and bring coding to life with Dash!