Apple Inc.’s Tim Cook visited Canada for the first time as CEO Monday, surprising students at a downtown Toronto Apple store to highlight the importance of learning to code, and dropping in on a group of developers to thank them for their contributions to the tech giant’s app store.
Cook surprised a class of Grade 7 students from Scarborough, Ont., as they learned how to program robots to dance on tables using Apple’s Swift programming language, recently introduced by the company as a low-barrier-to-entry way of coding.
Thank you, Toronto, for showing me your culture, your passion, and your creativity! Hope to see you again soon. / Merci, Toronto, de m’avoir montré ta culture, ta passion et ta créativité. À bientôt, j’espère. pic.twitter.com/YBwFJSZuXx
— Tim Cook (@tim_cook) January 23, 2018
The Canadian visit follows a similar surprise last week, when Cook visited a school in the United Kingdom, as part of a whistle-stop tour of Europe, where Apple recently launched its “Everyone Can Code” curriculum in several schools.
The unannounced visit by Cook, who as Apple’s chief executive since 2011 has overseen the rollout of the iPhone 7 and the Apple Watch, was the first time an Apple CEO has visited Canada since Steve Jobs made the trek north in the late 1980s.
“Swift came out of the fundamental recognition that coding languages were too geeky. Most students would look at them and say, ‘that’s not for me,” Cook said as the pre-teens participated in an Apple-designed “Everyone Can Code” workshop, which helps children learn how to build mobile apps, at the Apple Store in Toronto’s Eaton Centre.
“That’s not our view. Our view is that coding is a horizontal skill like your native languages or mathematics, so we wanted to design a programming language that is as easy to learn as our products are to use.”
There are 250,000 apps in the App Store that have been coded with Swift, including popular ones such as LinkedIn and AirBnb. In 2016, Apple released Swift Playgrounds, which turns learning the programming language into a game for people of all ages — though especially for students.
The CEO’s tour to promote the benefits of Apple technology comes after the company recently came under fire from shareholders over concerns about the addictive effects of gadgets and social media on young people.
