Apple wants kids to learn how to code, and it put its money where its mouth is at its Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco Monday with the announcement of Swift Playgrounds, an iPad app designed to teach people how to code.

The new app is said to make “learning to code fun and easy for anyone” and teaches users how to code using Apple’s Swift open source programming language, a compiled programming language that works on Apple’s iOS, macOS, watchOS, tvOS operating systems, as well as Linux.

Swift Playgrounds offers an interactive interface that encourages students and beginners to explore working with Swift and includes Apple-developed programming lessons where students write code to guide onscreen characters through an immersive graphical world, solving puzzles and mastering challenges.

The concept behind the gamification of the learning is that each challenge becomes more advanced as a user progresses, while providing a preview of the content and steps required as a user progress through each challenge.

To make it easier for users to learn how to program in the language Swift Playgrounds also includes a new keyboard specifically meant for coding such as the inclusion of brackets and parentheses on the main keyboard to make it easier to code without having to jump between keyboard layouts.

In addition, the app also features built-in templates to encourage users to express their creativity and create real programs that can be shared with friends using Mail or Messages or even posted to the web.

“I wish Swift Playgrounds was around when I was first learning to code,” Apple’s Senior Vice President of Software Engineering Craig Federighi said in a statement. “Swift Playgrounds is the only app of its kind that is both easy enough for students and beginners, yet powerful enough to write real code. It’s an innovative way to bring real coding concepts to life and empower the next generation with the skills they need to express their creativity.”

Cool

It may be somewhat nerdy cool, but Swift Playgrounds is none the less a cool idea that introduces a fun way to get kids in particular interested in coding.

While it may seem somewhat like child’s play, the programming lessons teach core coding skills and concepts such as issuing commands, creating functions, performing loops and using conditional code and variables, which although in this app are clearly geared towards teaching Swift, also apply across various other programming languages as well.

A preview release of Swift Playgrounds is available from today to Apple Developer Program members as part of the iOS 10 developer preview, and will be available with the iOS 10 public beta in July.

The final version of Swift Playgrounds will be available in the App Store for free in the fall; note, iOS 10 will be required to use it.

Image credit: Apple.