Non-profit educational initiative Bionic University, which was created as a part of currently frozen Bionic Hill project, has teamed up with Ukrainian software development company MacPaw to launch free courses on creating applications for Apple's iOS operating system.
After completing a 2.5 months-long course, students are expected to be able to write an app from scratch in the Objective-C programming language.
The new courses dubbed “iOS Dev Core” and “iOS Dev Advanced” are aimed at people with university-level knowledge of Java, C or C++ programming language and basic understanding of Objective-C. Bionic University also offers a few dozens of other free courses, divided into four categories — Tech skills, Soft skills, Entrepreneurship, and Leadership.
Although Objective-C has been the main tool for building apps running on Apple devices, it is not the only one anymore. In June 2014, Apple unveiled its own programming language called Swift, which is supposed to replace Objective-C sooner or later. However, Bionic University’s development director Oleksandr Zharikov still thinks that students can benefit from learning the older language.
“We are planning to add a Swift course in the future, we’re currently looking for a trainer for such a course,” he said. “Students who possess skills in Objective-C will be able to learn Swift faster. Moreover, code in Objective-C can work side-by-side with that in Swift in one project.”
The courses alumni are expected to be knowledgeable enough to apply for a junior software developer position, Zharikov told the Kyiv Post.
“MacPaw will keep an eye at the students’ achievements. It’s not unlikely that the most successful alumni will be offered a position in the company,” MacPaw’s founder Oleksandr Kosovan added.
As of June 2014, the average monthly salary of an inexperienced junior software engineer writing in Objective-C in Kyiv was $900, according to the data of software developers community DOU.ua. For a software engineer with three to five years of experience in the language figure reaches $2,500.
The courses at Bionic University are paid for by Ways to the Future charity foundation owned by Vasyl Khmelnytskyi, member of Ukrainian parliament and shareholder of UDP, the property developer that was supposed to build Bionic Hill hub in Kyiv outskirts. The project, currently put on hold, also included a campus for Bionic University. Nowadays, the educational institution occupies one of the buildings of the Kyiv Mohyla Academy in Kyiv city center.
MacPaw, which provides students learning Objective-C with an access to a wide range of Apple gadgets in a special lab, is a software development company founded in 2008 in Kyiv by Oleksandr Kosovan, who was only 21 at that time. The company’s main products are Clean MyMac and other utility applications for Mac and PC computers, as well as mobile apps for iOS, whose recently presented version 8 for the mobile devices caused a lot of troubles for the customers and even dropped shares of the globe’s biggest tech company by almost 4 percent at some point.
Andrii Degeler is the Kyiv Post’s information technology reporting fellow. Degeler has been covering the IT business in Ukraine and internationally since 2009. His fellowship is sponsored by AVentures Capital, Ciklum, FISON and SoftServe. He can be reached on Twitter (@shlema) or [email protected].
