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Teaching Programming on iOS

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I have been working for some time on a plan to move my programming classes off Macs and onto iPads. It's finally happening this year. A few people have asked me to write this up, so here goes.

As everyone knows, there are no fully-fledged software development environments for iOS. The closest is a game programming environment called Codea which, while good, doesn't easily map to the kinds of things we currently teach in exam-level Computing courses.

A few years ago, I used to teach using RealBasic on OS X. RealBasic is a fairly standard clone of VisualBasic, the language and IDE that (I guess) most Computing courses are taught with. I hated it. I hated it because the evident link between the code you wrote and the way it executes is quite obscure. I spent as much time explaining where you should type in the code as I did explaining the actual code itself.

Two years ago, I decided to change things. I switched to teaching in Ruby and I switched to using a text editor (TextWrangler) and Terminal. The simplicity is glorious! A simple link between code and result, and no magic glue in-between. I fully appreciate that libraries, frameworks and runtime support are all essential to scale software development up to real-world dimensions but that's not the game I'm playing.

Enter iPad

One of the astonishing results of our iPad 1:1 deployment has been the dramatic decline in the use of the Mac. Within less than two years, I am the only teacher still using the Mac on a regular basis. This was never part of the plan and I didn't expect that it would happen so soon. I thought it might happen eventually – perhaps in 3-4 years, certainly after one more refresh of our Mac setup.

Today, it quite seriously looks like we won't buy more than a handful of Macs again. We’re not cutting our teaching to fit what the iPad can do either – we have never done more with ICT, with better outcomes and deeper learning than we are doing now with iPads in everyone's hands.

Taking Programming Mobile (and Virtual)

So, how do we take Ruby programming mobile? Turns out, it's not so hard (assuming you understand AWS cloud computing infrastructure, IP addressing, SSH configuration and Linux sysadmin, naturally).

The basic idea is that we are going to set up an Amazon EC2 instance, SSH into it and edit and execute our code over there. There are several really nice SSH clients for iOS. My personal favourite is Prompt by Panic, but the idea is the same regardless of the client.

Source: fs.

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