I got my kid the littleBits Droid Inventor Kit for Christmas. The free Droid App for the Inventor Kit works great. It is easy to use and is fun to play with but imagine my surprise when someone at the Apple Store told me that The Droid Inventor Kit also work with Apple’s Swift Playgrounds.

What you’ll need

1. littleBits Droid Inventor Kit
2. an iPad that can run iOS 10
3. Apple’s Swift Playgrounds

How to make Playgrounds work with The Droid Inventor Kit

If you have downloaded Swift Playgrounds and tapped on "Accessories" on the bottom menu bar, you will find The Droid Inventor Kit is not pre-installed on Swift Playgrounds.

You will need to visit the littleBits website (http://littlebits.cc/littlebits-droid-inventor-kit-swift-playgrounds) on your iPad’s web browser and tap the link to the module. You will be promptefd to “Open in Playgrounds”

What is has

The exercises gets rid the messy curly brackets and semi-colons, and focuses on concepts of Functions and Values. I think this is good. A beginner can jump right into the core concepts of writing Functions and Values.

The final exercise is a lesson on how to create a custom Function and how to utilize the “for” function.

What its missing

Playgrounds (at the time of this post) only offers one set of exercises. There is no bank template to play with after the exercises are complete.
Playgrounds refers to "Functions" as "Commands".
I imagine it is helpful for a child to have a mentor to explain the concepts of Functions and Values during the exercises.

My thought

If you have littleBits Droid Inventor Kit, go ahead and try it out. Swift Playgrounds is a free download, it’s fun to play with, and it’s a simple way to get kids interested in coding without the daunting curly brackets and semi-colon indicative of languages like C++ or Java.