Apple has today announced that is launching a new app development curriculum designed to teach students how to start using Swift to create fully functional iPhone apps. The course is available for free on iBooks (plus teacher’s guide) for anyone to download, and builds on the Everyone Can Code series Apple already publishes.

This fall, Apple says six American community colleges will teach the curriculum as well as ‘select high schools’. Apple wants to help more people learn to code and enter the app economy.

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Apple has partnered with Tynker, a San Francisco-based STEM education platform, to release two new game-based programming lessons aimed to help kids learn how to code. The new Space Cadet and Dragon Spells courses are available for free.

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The Tiobe Index – which measures the popularity of programming languages on a monthly basis – reports that Apple’s Swift has made it into the top 10 for the first time. Tiobe says that ratings are based on three factors, using search engines to carry out the research.

The ratings are based on the number of skilled engineers world-wide, courses and third party vendors. Popular search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo!, Wikipedia, Amazon, YouTube and Baidu are used to calculate the ratings. It is important to note that the TIOBE index is not about the best programming language or the language in which most lines of code have been written.

While a relatively new programming language making it into the top 10 is an impressive achievement, Tiobe does not believe that it will climb any higher in the rankings …

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