I've been looking for something similar to this for my 12-year old son. Are there any other resources you guys can recommend to help teach coding? (that aren't Apple-product dependent?)
Now, perhaps I've misinterpreted your question, and you'd just like a list of alternatives to keep your options open. I've not looked really hard, not having any kids and all, but there seems to be a dearth of options that meet the (IMO) high bar Playgrounds has set. Me, I wonder if the 2nd-best alternative isn't an old machine with QBasic on it. I just don't see anything else out there that doesn't start with "Step 1: Let's learn about dependency trees!"
It's a visual programming environment, so moving into a second more traditional (text-based) programming language is a non-trivial step, but scratch gets you thinking in terms of algorithms, teaches about what variables are and why they matter, loops and conditionals, etc.
The hardware part of the course is also available on coursera now. [2] Previous discussion on hn [3].
[1] http://www.nand2tetris.org/
1. Getting familiar with the platform and toolchains. We all know that these toolchains will be obsolete when your kid grows up. But we have to start from somewhere.
2. What matters is the creative exploration via programming. Whether your kid ends up becoming a Swift (or an iOS) developer is a different matter.
3. One of the advantages of Swift playground on iPad is to liberate the swift learning experience from XCode, which requires you to buy an Apple computer. Another one is being touch native, the design and programming experience will be different from the traditional keyboard and mouse.
4. On the other end, with open source swift on Linux, kids also have opportunities to learn lower level non-graphic programming all the way down to llvm (http://llvm.org/) on portable Linux platforms such as Docker and the cloud. Again, whether your kid ends up being a "server programmer" is also a different matter.
Here is an example of a non-graphic interactive "playground" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Read%E2%80%93eval%E2%80%93prin...) for the same language. https://asciinema.org/a/79773
Although it won't deliver the same kind of user experience as Apple product, but there is no reason to believe that kids can only learn from traditional GUI. And to be honest, nobody knows what the future user and programming interface would be.
Kids will find out themselves.
https://github.com/open-swift https://github.com/VeniceX https://github.com/Zewo
This is just one example.
https://docs.racket-lang.org/drracket/
http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/matthias/HtDP2e/
Someone below mentions Khan Academy. It's approach is similar and stays on the straight-and-narrow in its use of Javascript:
- Pico-8 (Lua)
- Love2d (Lua)
- Scratch (visual coding)
referenced here: http://www.livebinders.com/play/play?id=810282
Unfortunately the bigger the list, the less likely profitable info has been highlighted. I also didn't note where I found this info; bummer.
It's a live programming environment with instruction to go along with it.
(Disclaimer: Used to work there; didn't work on CS)