Swift Playgrounds Expands Coding Education to Robots, Drones and Musical Instruments

Swift Playgrounds Expands Coding Education to Robots, Drones and Musical Instruments

Apple today announced that Swift Playgrounds, its educational coding app for iPad, will offer a new way to learn to code using robots, drones and musical instruments. Apple is working with leading device makers to make it easy to connect to Bluetooth-enabled robots within the Swift Playgrounds app, allowing kids to program and control popular devices, including LEGO MINDSTORMS Education EV3, the Sphero SPRK+, Parrot drones and more. The Swift Playgrounds 1.5 update will be available as a free download on the App Store beginning Monday, June 5.

With Swift Playgrounds, users can program and control these devices from within the app:

  • LEGO MINDSTORMS Education EV3
  • Sphero SPRK+ robotic ball rolls, turns, accelerates and changes colors.
  • Parrot’s Mambo, Airborne and Rolling Spider drones can take off, land, turn and perform aerial figures
  • UBTECH’s Jimu Robot MeeBot Kit lets kids program their buildable robot to walk, wave and dance
  • Dash by Wonder Workshop is a hands-on learning robot for students
  • Skoog is a tactile cube that enables children of all abilities to have fun exploring, creating and playing music with Swift code

Pricing & Availability

Swift Playgrounds 1.5 with support for third-party devices will be available as a free download on the App Store beginning Monday, June 5. Swift Playgrounds is compatible with all iPad Air and iPad Pro models and iPad mini 2 and later running iOS 10 or later. For more information, visit: www.apple.com/swift/playgrounds.