If someone already had coding experience, definitely. Without it: probably still possible if they're smart and working on it for most of the time (so 5-8 hours

If someone already had coding experience, definitely. Without it: probably still possible if they're smart and working on it for most of the time (so 5-8 hours a day). It's surprising how quickly smart people can learn if they're interested and focused. At a summer camp called CTY (run by Hopkins), I saw a few hundred late middle and early high school students learn the equivalent (or more) of a semester's worth of college material (some at the upper undergraduate level at a top tier college) in three weeks. Covering the equivalent of a semester long intro-CS and basic digital logic circuits in three weeks is hard for anyone (or a full abstract algebra course, or a theory of computation course, etc.), but it's possible to do as a smart 8th grader. Given sufficient drive and time every day (CTY does 7 hours of classroom time every weekday), you could cover almost three college semesters of material with smart 8th-11th graders: there's almost no doubt that with smart adults you could do more. That's certainly enough time to take them from the basics to knowing enough about a single technology to make large projects in it. My only concern is that it probably isn't future proof: they would probably have a somewhat hard time learning a new technology because of the compressed learning experience. In general, I'd say overall retention rates from really compressed courses like the ones I mentioned above are much lower, so unless they kept building iOS apps immediately after the course they might have a harder time picking them back up than a person who learned the same material over a longer period.