Pathlight School students will now learn how to code as part of a national drive to teach computational thinking in all schools.
Swift Accelerator, a coding programme based on the Everyone Can Code curriculum delivered by Apple-certified trainers, was launched on Wednesday (13 Mar), marking the first time coding is made accessible to a special needs school in Singapore.
The Everyone Can Code curriculum allows students from kindergarten to university to learn and write code using Swift, Apple’s programming language.
About 5,000 schools, communities and technical colleges around the world are said to be using the curriculum, according to Apple.
Ms Denise Phua, co-founder of Pathlight School in Ang Mo Kio, said coding or computational thinking is an integral part of the new literacy.
“We need to update our curriculum for our special needs students with these new items (coding). If we don’t do that, what they learn might be incomplete or even irrelevant,” she said.
She added that for the autism community, whose members have a natural inclination to learn things in a structured way and who have very good info-comm technology skills, it opens job opportunities and an avenue for them to excel as much as possible.
Kaeden Chan, 13, a Pathlight School student who was present at the launch said that his dream is not to be just an end-user of Apple’s products, but to sell his own app on Apple’s App Store.
In addition, he said he prefers to create games, instead of other apps, as they are fun to play and sell better.
The other tech giant, Google, does not have coding programmes in any special needs school in Singapore. But it has hosted an online safety workshop with Grace Orchard School, a special needs school in Jurong West.
It has also taught at the Dyslexia Association about how to use Google’s productivity suites of Docs, Slides and Sheets.
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Source: The Straits Times, 13 March 2019