What is it?
Apple Developer Academy Foundation, known as ‘Foundation’, it’s basically an educational, innovation and development program from Apple (of course), with focus on all kind of developers (seniors, juniors, students, whatever...) It lasts about 30 days, and the main objective is learn their language, Swift, and how to use it to make IOS applications.
First Impressions
My first impact was at the moment that I entered their lab, all the equipments are great, you can write in all walls, the sound is really well distributed at the room, the lighting is very comfortable and inspire creativity, postites all the ways around, the groups are divided at ‘islands’ with their own tables and equipments.
Arriving at the first day, the staff gave us a essential kit for developments, containing a macbook pro and an iphone. no doubt that was great have a macbook to work, it made everything easier, and we could use the iphone to test how we were going with the applications, of course.
Methodology
The first difference that i noticed was the methodology, they use the CBL (Challenge Based Learning) it consists, how the own name says, in challenges that ‘force’ you to learn something, not necessarily programming, and we had different challenges with different purposes.
The CBL is divided at three pillars, engage, investigate and act. In the future i’ll write a new article deeper about the CBL methodology, so you can understand it better.
Challenges and Knowledge division
The knowledges were divided at challenges, the first one, was about design, in my case we had to redesign an overpast application, my team and I choosed the consecrated Windows Live Messenger (MSN), i’m going to write about this challenge on a specific post later.
The second challenge was focused in learning the basic of the swift language, so we could start our works. We prefered to implement the design made at the first challenge.
And finally the third and final challenge was make an real application, we used a Scrum process to make the development and the studies easier, it helped a lot. Here’s a link to our CBL process. we had the idea to make a Cryptocurrency Market Simulator.
Conclusions
For me, foundation is a great experience and can teach you a lot, not just about mobile development, but another things that are very important in a development process of anything, you can learn how to create something, have a good idea and implement it.
The only disappointment was the short time, we had to do a lot shortly, but at the same time it was good to force us to learn fast and try to do our best in that period.
So, i really recommend it, if you have the opportunity. Google for foundation in your city, if it doesn’t have, another opportunities will appear, so don’t worry.
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