In the first part of this teacher's guide series to Matt Neuburg's book, I advised you to send your students away over the break to read chapters 2, 4 and 5. Now they have returned eager, if slightly overwhelmed, and wanting to learn more, gain clarity in their new knowledge and to begin making apps.
Convenient for us we've arrived at Chapter 6, 'Anatomy of an Xcode Project', which is all about using Xcode to create apps. However, the last thing that I would advise is a single lesson learning the Xcode program.
These students of yours are unlikely to have ever needed to consult a manual before for a GUI, and so it will come as a shock that they should be sat down and taught as if they had walked into a lesson on using Microsoft Office. So don't do it!
This doesn't mean that they won't need to be taught the ins and outs of the program, since it has greater complexity than even high end GUI programs like Adobe's range of Creative Suite tools. But you'll integrate this into the teaching of the coding, and be the one that teaches them when they are stuck.
Therefore you need to learn the program as thoroughly as possible so that you have the knowledge on hand when they have a question, because fumbling through the menus and help items could take all day otherwise and be very embarrassing.
So how do you learn? The same way as your students will learn: watching a teacher use the program. And for this I recommend watching Paul Hegarty's series of iOS lectures at Stanford on iTunes U, something that I'd recommend anyway for anyone learning or teaching iOS programming - so we've killed two birds with one stone here.
What about Chapter 6? Neuburg's book does walk you through the entire process of using Xcode and could well stand on its own as a way of learning, but seeing it and hearing a teacher explain things makes it all even clearer. I would therefore recommend Chapter 6 as a point of reference for detailed explanations and tips that will supplement your watching of the Hegarty's lectures: e.g. how to hide graphical elements of your app without deleting them, shortcuts and how to change program names.
(Note: Installing Xcode is simply a case of downloading it from the Mac App Store, so nothing for you to do here.)
Convenient for us we've arrived at Chapter 6, 'Anatomy of an Xcode Project', which is all about using Xcode to create apps. However, the last thing that I would advise is a single lesson learning the Xcode program.
These students of yours are unlikely to have ever needed to consult a manual before for a GUI, and so it will come as a shock that they should be sat down and taught as if they had walked into a lesson on using Microsoft Office. So don't do it!
This doesn't mean that they won't need to be taught the ins and outs of the program, since it has greater complexity than even high end GUI programs like Adobe's range of Creative Suite tools. But you'll integrate this into the teaching of the coding, and be the one that teaches them when they are stuck.
Therefore you need to learn the program as thoroughly as possible so that you have the knowledge on hand when they have a question, because fumbling through the menus and help items could take all day otherwise and be very embarrassing.
So how do you learn? The same way as your students will learn: watching a teacher use the program. And for this I recommend watching Paul Hegarty's series of iOS lectures at Stanford on iTunes U, something that I'd recommend anyway for anyone learning or teaching iOS programming - so we've killed two birds with one stone here.
What about Chapter 6? Neuburg's book does walk you through the entire process of using Xcode and could well stand on its own as a way of learning, but seeing it and hearing a teacher explain things makes it all even clearer. I would therefore recommend Chapter 6 as a point of reference for detailed explanations and tips that will supplement your watching of the Hegarty's lectures: e.g. how to hide graphical elements of your app without deleting them, shortcuts and how to change program names.
(Note: Installing Xcode is simply a case of downloading it from the Mac App Store, so nothing for you to do here.)
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