July fruitful for young brains at Apple Stores

US tech giant Apple Inc's famous free summer camp for children attracted hordes of Chinese kids last month. Thousands of young campers learned to make movies, play with robots, and even write code using iPad.

Apple Camp is a free annual three-day session where young kids get to expand their creativity with hands-on digital projects with the help of experts at Apple Stores.

The three-week global program was conducted at select Apple Stores across the US, the UK, Canada and China this year.

Such as new stores in Xiamen, Fujian province, and Guangzhou, Guangdong province, join the program.

The latest 9.7-inch iPad Pro and Apple's coding platform Swift Playground were used during the training program.

Kids aged 8-12 got the opportunity to work with visual blocks, solve puzzles and program Sphero robots.

Apple said kids were also able to learn filmmaking skills. They also created interactive books complete with illustrations and sound effects.

This year's program was available for online registration on Apple's website in late June. Participants were selected on first-come-first-served basis. The program got underway on July 11.

This is how the program unfolded over the weeks in July:

1 Week beginning July 11

Interactive Storytelling with iBooks: Campers created their own interactive books and learned about the elements of writing a story, from idea to storyboarding. They drew illustrations using an iPad, and then added sound effects and Multi-Touch features using iBooks Author on a Mac.

2 Week beginning July 18

Stories in Motion with iMovie: Campers learned everything they needed to create their own movies. They storyboarded ideas, shot video, and delved into other aspects of the filmmaking process. Then, they edited their new epics in iMovie.

3 Week beginning July 25

Coding Games and Programming Robots: Kids learned visual block-based coding for games, applying logic skills such as pattern-recognition and problem-solving. Then, they used what they had learned to program their own robots to perform tasks, challenges and much more.

liuzheng@chinadaily.com.cn