Apple has updated Swift Playgrounds, a free iPad app to teach kids of any age basic coding skills in Swift, to version 1.1. The upgrade — available at the Apple App Store — adds new Learn to Code lessons, support for sound and music.
Playgrounds is designed to teach basic programming concepts like loops and conditionals using an animated character that the budding programmers direct by writing code. The app offers suggestions for code to be used, and Swift Playgrounds also has a special iOS coding keyboard to ease entry of all of those pesky brackets.