On Friday 19 January Harlow College was delighted to welcome Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, to meet staff and students to see how we are adding coding and app development to skills for our students in their future careers. 

Tim Cook was there to celebrate the announcement that Harlow College is one of 70 colleges and universities across Europe to adopt Everyone Can Code, a program designed by Apple to help everyone learn to build mobile apps using Swift, a programming language already used to create over 250,000 apps to date including AirBnB, TripAdvisor and Yelp. 

During the visit Tim joined a group of Level 2 IT students learning to code with Swift Playgrounds on iPad, listening to their experiences of using the app for their learning and asking them about their aspirations. He tweeted following his visit to say “thanks to students, teachers and staff @HarlowCollege outside London, one of the first in Europe to adopt Apple’s App Development with Swift curriculum. Keep learning, keep coding!"

Nathan, 16 from Harlow, said: “I was really excited knowing that the CEO of Apple was coming to our class today. I wanted to show him how much the Swift Playground app has helped in my learning.”

Athena, 17 from Stansted, was equally excited to meet the Apple CEO: “Tim seemed very interested in how we were getting on using Swift Playground in our learning. I was impressed with how down to earth he was.”

Karen Spencer, Principal of Harlow College, said: “At Harlow College, we recognise that learning to code will help students prepare for a technological future. It develops their approach to problem solving, logic and reasoning, as well as reinforcing key mathematical skills.

“Everyone Can Code demonstrates how any student can code by providing a unique and innovative environment for learning.”

In November 2017 Harlow College was awarded Apple Distinguished School status, the first FE College in the country to achieve this status, for its enterprising approach to transforming learning by instilling and developing digital confidence.

Full details of Apple's announcement is available here. 

Leading European technical colleges adopt Apple’s Everyone Can Code initiative