Apple and the Chicago Public School system have a new partnership that will see every student in the district learning how to code. More specifically, 450,000 kids and young adults will learn Swift, the language used to write iOS apps.
The program is part of Apple’s “Everyone Can Code” initiative, which has already helped bring programming classes to 1500 elementary and high schools, as well as 60 community colleges. Apple says the initiative’s goal is to increase diversity among the developer population. “We’ve fundamentally concluded instead of just waiting and going into the four-year school system and seeing how many women and minorities are graduating in coding, which is abysmal, that we had to back up,” said Apple CEO Tim Cook. “(We have to go) all the way into elementary school and junior high school in order to fundamentally change the diversity.”
