SHE IS FROM KANSAS. She is one of those people who change the very weather pattern of a room from neutral to warm just by entering it. She is earthy and happy, a woman grounded in her family and her homes. She is the Kansas of our imagination: a land of twisters, open fields, big landscapes, straight talk, and The Wizard of Oz.
Meg can say Holy smokes, or That’s where the hockey puck ends up, or Egad without a touch of self-consciousness. She is the kind of person who always gets invited back. She had a monster career at Apple, which she is predictably modest about. She was an early employee there, a key player in the startup of the App stores, iTunes U, and the iBooks store. She even half-apologized to my daughter for helping to create Siri.
But after the pandemic, she decided that New Mexico would be a great place to bring Apple’s coding program to the schools. And, apparently, Apple takes Meg’s enthusiasm and ideas very seriously – with remarkable speed, she was empowered and funded to test a coding curriculum called “Everyone Can Create.”
She is in full go mode with some programs already started. When she delivers her initial results to Apple, the next step will be a comprehensive plan to get the financial and product support to change the landscape of higher education in New Mexico.
Holy smokes.
Why is coding so important for a kid to learn?
Coding is a language for communication that is kind of the more contemporary gateway to any kind of science or art pursuit.
How do you introduce kids to coding?
What’s great about what we did at Apple in terms of a coding curriculum is that we started out with a gamified version of coding. So you actually have a character byte that you’re guiding through an environment. And as you’re moving that through that, you’re learning about code. It’s a cool way to learn it because you don’t realize you’re actually learning how to code! It’s a very natural engagement. Coding doesn’t really have to be like onerous or tough or challenging. Everyone can code.
The bad rap in coding is that it’s for left-brain nerds, that it’s not about life or feelings.
I’ll be honest with you, I didn’t know how to code. At Apple, I was great at business development and strategy and planning and product specifications, but I thought, Well, gosh, can an oldster like me code? So with our product marketing team, we created environments where we took it step by step and made it engaging in an Apple fun way.
By the end, I was building my own app, a scavenger hunt app. I actually put it on my phone and I went, Holy smokes, I can code. I want every kid to have that joy of like, Hey, I can create cool stuff. Because then once you do that, then you open your horizons to coding and creativity and all these other things that are really the contemporary language of the world.
So that’s when I came to Santa Fe and saw that we didn’t have coding programs like this here. I went, I have to do this.
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Photo SFM
