We’ve always wanted to make our robots (drawn by the fabulous Timothy Winchester) and now they’re alive and shakin’ their booties!

We’re super excited to announce that Samsung is going to be supporting Code Club throughout 2014 and hopefully beyond! We’re going to be working together on a series of activities designed to encourage and support more people to start and run Code Clubs in the UK.

To celebrate we’ve designed a web app that helps you create a dancing robot! Children at Primary schools in the UK are then invited to enter their dancing robot into our competition. The public will vote to decide the winner and the winning entrant will receive a Samsung 15″ Ativ Book 4 laptop for themselves and 10 laptops for their primary school.  If you’re over 11 that’s ok you can still do the Robo-Boogie with us and share your dance online too!

Later in the year we’ll be opening five Code Club Regional Centres across the UK with the help of Samsung. We’ll be equipping community centres who currently have no computing provision with Samsung laptops. Those centres will be running public Code Clubs once a week and we’ll be able to run training events and meet ups from them too. The first Regional Centre is at Dragon Hall Community Centre in London which we’re super excited about. We’ll then be looking for community centres in cities across the UK – more detail on that soon!

For now – LET’S DANCE!

Big thanks to Hover Studio for the sweet app build, Albion for the rad site build and Animade for the fantastic promo video!

Twelve children at Amherst Primary School in Guernsey are taking part in a Code Club run by local digital agency Indulge Media. The development team at Indulge take it in turns to teach weekly coding classes which began in September at the start of the school year.

Director Russell Isabelle said: “We decided to get involved with Code Club because we believe that by generating interest in the possibilities of computer sciences from an early age, we can inspire the next generation to take an active role in innovation and creating technology instead of simply teaching them how to use it.

“As an employer in the digital industry it is difficult to find local individuals with the skills we require. Although technology plays an increasingly dominant role in modern society, the current ICT curriculum still revolves around basic computer use – there is very little emphasis on how to actually design or create. Coding and programming is behind everything we do on computers and the internet and we think students should be given a taste of what they have the potential to create.

“It is highly rewarding for our team to watch children respond positively and use computers in this way. Code Club is great and we would encourage other creative agencies, who might be able to deliver this opportunity to other schools across the island, to get involved.”

Amherst Primary School Headteacher Tracey Moore thinks the initiative is an ideal way to get the children thinking more deeply about technology at a crucial age. “The response we have had from students has been incredibly positive and it’s great to see them engaging with a new skill outside of the standard curriculum. The Indulge team have been brilliant at engaging with the children and we hope that we will be able to offer more students the same opportunity in years to come.”