What to Expect in CodePath’s iOS Development Pathway

Hi everyone my name is Mario and I am the iOS curriculum developer here at CodePath and I’m just going to talk to you for a few minutes about what our iOS pathway looks like for starters we have our iOS 101 course offering which is really tailored towards introducing students what iOS development looks like and what the possibilities of being a mobile Engineering in the iOS space also looks like we take students into this course with no background in Swift programming or iOS programming the only requirement is that you have some object oriented programming and really you can see here in our overview page we have this list of projects that we work on list of labs that we work on and really what those topics are so we start from the ground up learning Swift which is a programming language that we use to build iOS apps we introduce some UI Basics using a storyboard and students leave the first seven weeks with a hand a handful of tools they can use to build their own apps and then they spend the last three weeks building their own individual app which they can present if they want to at the conclusion of this course the structure of this class is that every week you will have a three components to your learning there will be a two hour synchronous session and during that two hour synchronous session you’re going to have a 30 to 60 minute lecture by an industry professional or instructor of some kind after that 30 to 60 Minute window you’re going to let’s let’s pick a random unit on unit 5 implementing table view so you’re going to have a 30 to 60 minute lecture on on how what table views are and why we use them and what their purposes are then we’re going to have a lab built around what this looks like in the second hour of your two hour synchronous session which happens once a week and the goal of this lab is for you to get some hands-on experience and collaboration with your classmates on how to build this app usually this is a more sandbox environment where we provide you starter code and give you make sure that you’re focusing on the particularly important parts of the lab and there are instructions nothing here is really a secret kind of a walkthrough of how to build this and usually there’s a list of features that we want to make sure that you implement we give you kind of like a walkthrough of how to do that and this is sort of like your your source of Truth this is where you learn how to do things and at the end your apps should be able to do a couple of things for example this app should be able to get an array of data objects from an API display a list of objects and load some images that’s really what the goal of this lab is then that’s the second component of your learning the third component of your learning and even more importantly is making that implementation your own by building your own app now in iOS 101 you’re going to be working with starter codes for almost all of your projects and that’s because we want to make sure that the point of the emphasis of learning is on that particular technique that you’re trying to work on so we don’t want you to spend too much time on building things that are not really relevant to your learning at this point in time now by the conclusion of this seven week stretch you should have enough skills to start building out your own app and I can demo an example of what that app might look like if we come here and we look at an example of one of the apps that you build in the course and if we come here give it a second the emulator can take it three times at times this is an app called Flixster and basically it’s an app that fetches data from the internet and displays a list of movies that are currently in theaters now what’s really cool about this app is that you are integrating apis and networking into your application you’re reading data from the internet which is something that almost all of the apps that we do that we use today implement and what’s even cooler is that there’s sort of this UI component to it like this here where we can go into a more detail view to see what else is going on in this movie like if it’s cut off or something like that and then additionally we’re having local persistent so one thing we can do is if we go here to this favorites tab we can favorite movies that then populate automatically here and this is not Network dependent this is stored locally on your phone and as you add or remove movies they’re removed from here so this is kind of the end goal project for you something that gets information from the internet and allows you to display it in a in a way that looks very nice and that really is the finished product of iOS 101 now going into iOS 102 let’s come here iOS 102 kind of picks up where iOS one of one left off and it kind of brings you through a much deeper ramp where you’re still starting with the UI Basics but a lot of it is a little bit more to the point so there’s a kind of an assumption that there are some things you’ve already seen before but it’s expected that you don’t really remember it so there’s a little bit of a refresher and and the reason I use the word refresher is because it’s enough to refresh your skills but it’s probably not enough to teach you everything you need to know from scratch so the expectation when you go into iOS 102 is that you’ve already built iOS apps ideally our requirements are that you’ve done them with iOS 101 but there might be exceptions to students that have built iOS apps in other ways and we can look at those Case by case so our course goes through the same 10-week unit structure where we start with the basics we talk about navigation so showing different screens on our apps the same table view Concepts and passing data between table views and we also introduce networking and networking there’s really four major components for networking in the first course iOS 101 you really only explore read-only networking so there’s really no updating of data there’s no deleting data there’s no insertion of data that’s what we’re going to explore in the back end of iOS 102 where we create our own custom backend to make it an Instagram clone and a be real clone so the really cool thing about this is you’re going to be able to build your own feed of posts that can follow all of the rules that you want them to follow so if we go here to unit 6 for example this is an example of our Instagram clone where it kind of mimics the look of Instagram the really cool thing about this is that you can make it look however you want really what we’re looking for here is can you implement your own backend can you have your own post that’s really the the goal here and then that that layout can be very specific to what you want it to look like so this course also follows the three Pro pronged approach we have our 30 to 60 Minutes of asynchronous lecture we have our lab portion which is about an hour again a lot of things are kind of given to you you’re really working with a starter code and you’re given a lot hand holding as you build out these Labs because our goals with these labs are to teach you not to test you however once you come to the projects now the projects are immediately more challenging than what you had in iOS 101 almost none of these projects have starter code so we’re assuming that you’re building all of your apps from scratch which is a a little bit of a difference from iOS 101. Now what does an n project look like for iOS 101 well sorry for iOS 102 but one big difference is that our project is a group project and you’re going to have an extra week to work on it so here it’s really exciting to think about the ways that not only are we building a project there’s also a collaboration aspect to it and that’s really a key part of getting our students to be internship ready is that collaboration and group project building together which can also be done without demo day now let me show you what a finished iOS 102 project might look like and I will demo to you our clone of Instagram so we have here a very so as you can see this layout is a little bit different than the layout I showed you before and here we just have posts you can make the pictures look grounded you can have captions you can have the day you can Implement Maps there’s a lot that you can do with this stuff and really this is the whole goal of this is make it your own and learn how to use a custom backend to make an app that’s as powerful as you want it to be so here we’re looking for an app that lets us upload our pictures we found his ears and this is a pretty good picture of what a finished product might look like for iOS 102. Anyway I hope you found a lot of this exciting and if you have questions if you have doubts start with iOS 101 see how you feel about it and go from there