We are very pleased that Code Club’s co-founder and CEO, Clare Sutcliffe, has been awarded an MBE in the 2016 New Year’s Honours List for services to technology education.

Clare said; “This honour is dedicated to Code Club’s volunteers and supporters, who have played such a pivotal role in helping to provide opportunities for children across the UK to learn coding and digital making skills. It is a fantastic way for Code Club to end the year, and we are so excited to see what 2016 holds.”

As Christmas draws near we’re getting into the holiday spirit at Code Club HQ!

For those who are keen to keep coding over the break, we’ve got a list of some fun festive activities for you:

1. Remix our HTML project “Happy Birthday” to make a Christmas card to send to friends and family. See our attempt here.
2. It’s looking unlikely that we’ll have a white Christmas this year… but if you’re a registered volunteer, club host, or if your child attends a Code Club, then you can access our Scratch project “Snowball fight”. Have a go here.
3. We dug deep into the Code Club projects archives and found our “Christmas Capers” project – one of the very first batch of Scratch projects we made. For a dose of festive nostalgia, you can download the project here.

From everyone at Code Club, we wish you a very merry Christmas. We also want to say another big, BIG thankyou to all our amazing volunteers, teachers and supporters – it’s been a fantastic year for Code Club,  so thank you for all your hard work and dedication in 2015.

Over the past 2 weeks we’ve been counting down to the launch of the Principia mission which will see British Astronaut Tim Peake travel to the International Space Station on 15th December.

Last week two Raspberry Pi’s were successfully launched, and just a few days ago they made it aboard the ISS! That means there is now code created by one of our Code Clubs in space!

To mark all this exciting activity, we’ve created another space-themed Scratch project for our Code Clubs to try out, or for volunteers and children to try at home.

“Space Age” calculates age on other planets. You can code an alien to travel to other planets and tell you its age on that planet. Have a go at this, and our “Space Quiz” project, on the Countdown to Space Mission page of our projects site. 

We’ve also created some awesome Astronaut badges to print off and make at home. Download a set of 6 badges here.