This repository is used for the Codestars iOS course. Codestars is a free course that is meant to provide an introduction to programming concepts to absolute beginners. This course was developed by my wife, Felicia O'Garro, and I to create a low cost introduction to computer science and software engineering concepts to those that have limited access.
This curriculum is open sourced with the intent to allow anyone that is interested in learning how to program to complete the coursework through self-study or in a study group with friends. We also encourage those that want to teach to use this curriculum to teach a course to people in your community. We also encourage experienced teachers/instructors, and or software engineers to contribute to and modify this curriculum to keep improving it and updating it.
The best way to go through this assignment is to spend four to eight weeks on the prework before tackling the twelve week portion of the course. Everyone learns at their own pace so if it takes you a little bit longer to get through material that's fine. If you find yourself breezing through the material that's fine too.
Though this course uses iOS development as a teaching mechanism it really is what we envisioned to be a "Computer Science 101" course for the 21st century. We chose iOS because C and Objective-C are both low level programming languages that make easy to teach low level concepts such as pointers and memory management. Since mobile apps are something that most people want to make it provides students with the incentive to spend their time learning these concepts to be able to build an app of their own.
Students will find themselves learning about Object-oriented programming in addition to design patterns such as delegation, data source. Students will also learn the basics of HTTP, REST, databases and cloud computing.
Instead of trying to create our own curriculum from scratch we decided to use pre-existing materials that we found helpful with our own learning. For this we chose Harvard's CS50 course for programming basics, an introduction to the C programming language and Computer Science fundamentals. The text books that we use in this course are the Big Nerd Ranch's Guide to Objective-C , iOS Programming: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide to iOS Programming and Learn iOS 8 Programming. We also have assigned readings from blog posts and Apple's documentation. We also recommend that students watch the video lectures found in Stanford's free iOS course for additional reinforcement.
We have given this some thought and we plan to expend the curriculum to include Swift and not replace the C and Objective-C portion of the curriculum. We believe having knowledge of Objective-C is very helpful when learning Swift. If you know of some good learning resources for Swift and have some idea for projects feel free to submit a pull request with these additions.