Apple has announced that its Everyone Can Code initiative has been adopted in 70 colleges and universities across Europe. The initiative aims to help people create mobile apps for the App Store.
Education institutions in the U.K., Germany, Spain, France, Italy, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Austria, Ireland, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Luxembourg, Poland and Portugal are now offering Apple’s App Development with Swift curriculum, a full year-long coding course that has been designed by Apple educators and engineers.
Apple’s CEO Tim Cook has, many times in the past, expressed how hugely important he believes coding is for today’s workforce, stating “Since launching Everyone Can Code two years ago, we’ve seen growing excitement for the initiative from schools around the world, who are increasingly incorporating the curriculum into their classrooms.”
The company’s press release highlights institutions including the Technical University of Munich in Germany, which uses both Swift and ARKit to teach business skills that are relevant to the local workplace; Denmark’s publicly funded Mercantec Vocational College which will offer the course to 3,000 students; and the Hogeschool van Arnhem en Nijmegen in the Netherlands where 34,000 students will be given the opportunity to learn code. In the U.K., Harlow College will offer the course to 3,000 students, some of which include adults looking to get back into employment.
The Everyone Can Code initiative was introduced in early 2017 with the free materials that were available to download from the iBooks Store. At this time, six community colleges across the U.S., serving 500,000 students, agreed to offer the program. Later that year, this expanded to 30 more community colleges before it eventually became available internationally.
