Apple Summer Camp is a free three-day workshop for children that aims to help them learn coding. This year Apple is offering new Coding Games and Programming Robots courses to those that sign-up.

Apple has announced the new courses after revealing its Swift Playgrounds app for iPad. The app is aimed at teaching Apple's own Swift code to children from ages 12 and up. The Summer Camp course is taught in Apple Stores and is aimed at 8-12 year olds wishing to learn coding basics.

For gaming and robotics Apple says: "Kids will learn visual block-based coding for games, applying logic skills such as pattern recognition and problem solving. Then they’ll use what they’ve learned to program their own robots to perform tasks, challenges, and much more." This will mean using Tynker for block-based coding and Sphero PSRK for robotics.

Apple Summer Camp will also "teach children to make films by storyboarding ideas, shooting video and creating an original soundtrack," says the company. There will also be the chance to create interactive books with illustrations and sounds. At the end of the three-day course the "campers" will be given a chance to show off their work in the Apple Summer Camp Showcase.

The Camp is being pitched as a way to get children interested before moving on to the Swift Playgrounds coding app which they can use on an iPad at home. This will arrive on iOS 10 later in the year.

The Summer Camp courses for England run as follows: 

Week of July 25    - Coding Games and Programming Robots
Week of August 1 - Stories in Motion with iMovie
Week of August 8 - Interactive Storytelling with iBooks

You can check out the Summer Camps near you via the source link below. Find out more about the Swift Playgrounds app in the read link.

READ: Apple Swift Playgrounds app: Here's how it teaches kids to code on iPad