PRESS RELEASE 06 October 2017

Apple celebrates EU Code Week with free coding sessions

Apple will offer thousands of sessions tailored to aspiring coders of all ages and different skill levels.
London — Apple today announced it will offer hundreds of coding sessions at Apple retail stores across Europe in support of EU Code Week. From October 7-22, this initiative, supported by the European Commission, celebrates the importance of coding and aims to help people of all ages learn how to bring ideas to life with code.
Coding sessions are already an important part of learning programmes offered at every Apple store. Apple plans to offer more than 6,000 coding sessions across Europe in the next year as part of Today at Apple programmes at over 100 retail stores in ten countries. Aspiring coders of all ages can learn how to code in Swift, one of the world’s most popular programming languages. With sessions like ‘Get Started with Coding’, ‘Kids Hour Sphero Maze Challenge’ and ‘How to Program Robots with Swift Playgrounds’, there are sessions to suit different skill levels.
Swift Playgrounds is Apple’s free app for iPad that makes learning to code easy and fun for everyone.
‘We believe coding is the language of the future that everyone should have the chance to learn,’ said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. ‘We’ve built a range of innovative and free tools to make sure coding is fun and accessible to everyone. We know the incredible impact technology can have on lives and the opportunities it can bring to communities.’
The technology sector is one of the fastest-growing industries across Europe, and computing and informatics professionals are in high demand. There are now 1.36 million jobs in Europe attributable to Apple’s iOS app economy. Apple has paid out nearly $18 billion to developers across Europe since the App Store launched.
Apple introduced Swift Playgrounds and its comprehensive Everyone Can Code curriculum in 2016, both of which are available for free, with the goal of reinventing how to learn to code by making it easy and fun for everyone.
Apple’s comprehensive Everyone Can Code curriculum with lessons on iPad and Mac makes it easy to teach coding in the classroom.
Swift Playgrounds is a revolutionary app for iPad that makes it fun for first-time coders to learn and experiment with real Swift code. The app has been downloaded 1.4 million times worldwide since it was introduced last September and is available in 15 languages, including English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Swedish, Dutch and Turkish.
Apple’s Everyone Can Code curriculum is designed for educators and self-learners of all ages. The curriculum is available for grades K-12 and beyond, and comes with teacher guides and lesson plans to use in the classroom. Educators and students across the globe have downloaded more than 1 million Everyone Can Code resources from the iBooks Store.
Customers can find a local coding session at events.codeweek.eu and apple.com/uk/today.

Images of Apple’s Everyone Can Code curriculum

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