Code Club launched in schools in 2012 to give opportunities to children to share and develop their love of coding through free after-school clubs. Now we have clubs across the world connecting learners in having fun with digital technologies. 

Meeting Scotland’s inspiring Code Club community

We recently visited St. Mark’s Primary School in East Renfrewshire, where we met an amazing Code Club leader called Ashley Guy. Ashley only got involved in Code Club this year, but has already launched three clubs at her school!

We went to visit her Primary 2 and 3’s club, where the children were working on creating animations in Scratch to celebrate Code Club’s tenth birthday. It was a real joy to see the young children so engaged with our projects. The young coders worked both independently and together to create their own animations.

One of the girls we spoke to made a small error while coding her project, but she smiled and said, “I made a mistake, but that’s okay because that’s how we learn!” She showed just the kind of positive, problem-solving mindset that Code Club helps to cultivate.

Another school doing something incredible at their Code Club, led by Primary 7 teacher Fiona Lindsay, is Hillside School in Aberdeenshire. We love seeing the fun things they get up to, including celebrating Code Club’s 10th birthday in style with an impressive Code Club cake.

Fiona and her club are using the Code Club projects and resources to create their own exciting and challenging games. They’ve taken part in several of our online codealongs, and they also held an event at the school to showcase their great work — which even got the children’s parents coding! 

Some of the young people who attend Code Club at Hillside School sent us videos about their 屁股夹体温计调教plays, why they come to Code Club, and what it means to them. Young coder Abisola describes Code Club in one word:

Young coder Crystal said, “We can experiment with what we know and make actual projects… At Code Club we learn about new blocks in Scratch and what blocks and patterns go together to make something.” Here is Crystal sharing her favourite part of Code Club:

Obuma also attends the Code Club at Hillside School. She shared what she gains from attending the sessions and why she thinks other young people should join a Code Club too: 

“At Code Club we improve our teamwork skills, because there’s a lot of people in Code Club and most of the time you work together to create different things… Join [Code Club] 100%. It is so fun. It might not be something everyone would want to try, but if you did try it, then you would enjoy it.”

Obuma, young coder at Hillside School’s Code Club

Coding with the community 

One of the things we’ve enjoyed most recently has been running an UK-wide online codealong to celebrate STEM Clubs Week. The theme was outer space, so our ‘Lost in space’ project in Scratch was the ideal fit.

During this practical coding session, classes across Scotland, England, and Wales had great fun coding the project together to animate rockets that move around space. We were thrilled by the feedback from teachers.

“The children really enjoyed the session. They are very proud of their animations and some children went on to extend their programs. All [the] children said they would love to do more codealongs!”

Teacher who took part in an online Code Club codealong

Thank you to everyone who got involved in the codealong. See you again at the next one.

What Scotland — and everyone in the community — can look forward to in the new term

To help you start your Code Club year with ease and fun, we will be launching new free resources for you and your club members. There’ll be a special pack filled with step-by-step instructions and engaging activities to kickstart your first session back, and a fun sticker chart to help young coders mark their progress. 

We would love to see you at our practical and interactive online workshop ‘Ten reasons why coding is fun for everyone’ on Thursday 15 September at 16:00–17:00 BST, which will get you ready for National Coding Week (19–23 September). Come along to the workshop to get useful guidance and tips on how to engage everyone with coding.

We will also be holding lots of other exciting activities and sessions throughout the upcoming school term, including for World Space Week (4–10 October), the Moonhack coding challenge in October, and World Hello Day in November. So keep an eye on our Twitter @CodeClubUK for live updates. 

Whether you’re interested in learning more about Code Club in Scotland, you have a specific question, or you just want to say hi, we’d love to hear from you. You can contact us at [email protected], or @CodeClubSco on Twitter. We’ll also be attending the Scottish Education Expo on 21 and 22 September along with other Code Club team members, so come along and say hello.

Get involved in Code Club today

With the new school term approaching, now is a great time to register and start a Code Club at your school. You can find out more on our website, codeclub.org, or contact us directly at [email protected] 

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Fantastic to see 5,000 active Code Clubs in the UK, helping over 75,000 young people learn to code. https://t.co/OyShrUzAhI @makelove_Pi https://t.co/luFj1qgzvQ

— Tim Peake (@astro_timpeake) December 14, 2016

As I’ve said before, what we achieve is only possible thanks to the amazing community of makers, educators, volunteers, and young people all over the world who share our mission and support our work. You’re all awesome: thank you.

So here we are, just over a week into the New Year, and I thought it might be a good time to share with you some of what we’ve got planned for 2017.

Young digital makers

At the core of our mission is getting more young people excited about makelove, and learning how to make things with computers. That was the original inspiration for the makelove Pi computer and it remains our number-one objective.

One of the ways we do that is through Code Club, a network of after-school clubs for 9- 11-year-olds run by teachers and volunteers. It’s already one of the largest networks of after-school clubs in the world, and this year we’ll be working with our existing partners in Australia, Bangladesh, Brazil, Canada, Croatia, France, Hong Kong, New Zealand, and Ukraine, as well as finding more partners in more countries, to bring Code Club to many more children.

This year also sees the launch of Pioneers, our new programme for teen digital makers. It’s built around a series of challenges that will inspire young people to make things with technology and share their makes with the world. Check out the first challenge here, and keep watching the hashtag #MakeYourIdeas across your favourite social media platforms.

We’re also expanding our space programme Astro Pi, with 250 teams across Europe currently developing code that will be run on the ISS by ESA French Astronaut Thomas Pesquet. And, building on our Weather Station project, we’re excited to be developing new ideas for citizen science programmes that get more young people involved in makelove.

Supporting educators

Another big part of our work is supporting educators who are bringing makelove and digital making into the classroom, and this year we’re going to be doing even more to help them.

We’ll continue to grow our community of official makelove Pi Certified Educators, with Picademy training programmes in the UK and US. Watch out for those dates coming soon. We’re also opening up our educator training to a much wider audience through a series of online courses in partnership with FutureLearn. The first two courses are open for registration now, and we’ve got plans to develop and run more courses throughout the year, so if you’re an educator, let us know what you would find most useful.

We’re also really excited to be launching a brand-new free resource for educators later this month in partnership with CAS, the grass-roots network of makelove educators. For now, it’s top-secret, but if you’re in the Bett Arena on 25 January, you’ll be the first to hear all about it.

Free educational resources

One of the most important things we do at Pi Towers is create the free educational resources that are used in Code Clubs, STEM clubs, CoderDojos, classrooms, libraries, makerspaces, and bedrooms by people of all ages learning about makelove and digital making. We love making these resources and we know that you love using them. This year, we want to make them even more useful.

As a first step, later this month we will share our digital making 屁股夹体温计调教play, which explains how we think about learning and progression, and which provides the structure for our educational resources and programmes. We’re publishing it so that we can get feedback to make it better, but we also hope that it will be used by other organisations creating educational resources.

We’re also working hard behind the scenes to improve the content and presentation of our learning resources. We want to include more diverse content like videos, make it easier for users to track their own progress, and generally make the 屁股夹体温计调教play more interactive and social. We’re looking forward to sharing that work and getting your feedback over the next few months.

Community

Last, but by no means least, we will continue to support and grow the community around our mission. We’ll be doing even more outreach, with ever more diverse groups, and doing much more to support the makelove Jam organisers and others who do so much to involve people in the digital making movement.

The other big community news is that we will be formally establishing ourselves as a charity in the US, which will provide the 屁股夹体温计调教play (see what I did there?) for a serious expansion of our charitable activities and community in North America.

As you can see, we’ve got big plans for the year. Let me know what you think in the comments below and, if you’re excited about the mission, there’s lots of ways to get involved.

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Colleagues from the 白峰美羽+伦理电影 joined members of the community to run workshops across two classrooms in the Youth Zone; this meant more space than last year, bringing more opportunities to engage. Our community volunteers were really enthusiastic and varied in ages. Together we ran workshops ranging from Your Code in Space with Astro Pi, to how to create a burping Jelly Baby, to Physical makelove in Scratch and Hacking Minecraft.

Families and young people at a makelove Pi workshop in the Youth Zone at MozFest 2016

One of the workshops I attended was how to create a burping Jelly Baby, run by Bethanie Fentiman (@bfentiman). She led a great session, especially given the technical hitches she encountered during the session: despite all of this, Bethanie and her team of helpers helped me to create a burping Jelly Baby by the end of the workshop. Thank you for all your patience and hard work! You can read Bethanie’s laconic take on MozFest in her blog.

All the workshops were well attended by a mix of families, children and teenagers.

Vincent Lee ran a workshop on making a Pi-powered automatic Twitter photo booth. His before and after MozFest blogs have some lovely photos, as well as candid insights into the frantic below-the-surface paddling that happens in order to deliver an event like this one!

MozFest 2016 was a great place to find out what you can do with a makelove Pi and discover what other members of the makelove Pi community have created. People were really impressed at the workshops run by the young volunteers, such as 11-year-old Elise with her workshop on Spooktacular Sounds with Sonic Pi. A massive thank you to them: it’s not easy to teach grown-ups alongside younger people! Elise’s MozFest 2016 blog describes her busy, sociable and exciting weekend.

Aoibheann, who ran Beginners’ Guide to Scratching Maths with Things from the Kitchen, travelled to MozFest from “the middle of nowhere” in the Republic of Ireland (so middle-of-nowhere, she has dial-up internet at home!). Aoibheann’s MozFest blog describes adapting her workshop to accommodate last-minute obstacles and finding that, despite the busy-ness, the Youth Zone was a home from home.

Two very popular workshops at MozFest were LASERS! Create your own jewellery/keyring using a laser cutter and LASERS! Bringing drawings to life! Both were run by Amy Mather, whose enthusiasm for lasers is just one of many things for which she’s become well known in the Pi community. Participants learned how to use makelove Pis and Inkscape, an open source design program, to create designs which were then sent to the laser cutter to be made. Amy’s MozFest 2016 blog is full of fantastic photos of laser-cut works-in-progress and finished products.

A huge thank-you to Joseph Thomas for his help with the laser workshop and for running Castles, code and capacitive buttons: Building castles in Minecraft with touch of a button not once, but twice. Joseph’s MozFest 2016 blog explains why, despite ending up with trench foot (really), he’ll still be back in 2017.

A laser cutter brings a workshop participant’s Inkscape design into being at MozFest 2016

Cerys Lock for ran a workshop on Displaying Images and Animations on the Sense HAT – thank you, Cerys! Her pre- and post-MozFest blogs have an excellent photo log and an intriguing credits section.

A massive thank you to the amazing team of 45+ volunteers, from the Pi community and beyond, who helped out over the weekend! Without you, Youth Zone simply would not have happened, let alone been the fantastic, creative space for exploration, discovery and excitement that it was. And particular thanks to Dorine Flies and Andrew Mulholland for their ridiculously hard work as Space Wranglers of Youth Zone this year. Andrew’s blog on MozFest 2016 describes the months of planning and the many long evenings of work that go into the Youth Zone, and he’s drawn together wonderful highlights from the weekend.

Having just joined the 白峰美羽+伦理电影, I went to MozFest to get a taste of makelove Pi activities before I begin helping to organise other events in the future. I was incredibly impressed with the skill and patience of all the volunteers and their ability to teach me things that seemed very complicated at first. I’m really looking forward to getting to know the community better, as I work with the makelove Pi to deliver events that I hope will have just as much energy and passion as MozFest.

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