Month: April 2016

Code Club is Four!

Happy birthday to us,

Happy birthday to us,

Happy birthday dear Code Club!

It’s Code Club’s fourth birthday – hooray! We’re very excited to have reached the big four and we are so grateful to all the fabulous people who have helped us get there, but most of all our amazing volunteers.

CC 4 birthday

Code Club’s CEO, Clare Sutcliffe said “It’s so exciting to see how far Code Club has come over the last 4 years. We’ve grown rapidly as an organisation, expanding across the UK and in countries around the world. With the dedication and passion of Code Club’s volunteers, we have managed to give thousands of children the opportunity to learn about coding and digital making. I am incredibly proud of the amazing achievements of the Code Club community.”

For the mathematically minded amongst you, here’s a few four related statistics especially for our anniversary:

4177 + 4 = 4181 the current number of registered Code Clubs in the UK

500 x 4 = 2000 the number of registered Code Clubs across the rest of the world

27132 ÷ 4 = 6783 the amount of tweets we have sent about Code Club

We’ll be hosting a virtual celebration this week by remembering some of our proudest Code Club moments and sharing them on Twitter & Facebook. Have you got any inspiring, funny or wonderful Code Club moments you want to share as part of the celebration? Share them with us using #CodeClubIsFour

Right, off to find some cake…

Your Feedback Matters

In January we sent out a survey to all Code Club volunteers past and present, and we were really grateful that 688 of you took the time to fill it in. Thanks!

The purpose of the survey was to find out how we could improve and make our valued volunteers as happy as they could be with our service.

20% of you who filled in the survey told us that you were no longer running a Code Club, so we asked why and this is what you told us:

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The majority said it was a simple matter of not having time anymore, or of your circumstances changing – life happens! However, we thought more about this and agreed it would be good if we had some clearer steps to take if your circumstances do change. We’re working on a pack of resources to make it easy for you and the venue to find someone else to take over the club so the children can still attend.

15% of you said you didn’t get enough support from Code Club. We’re pleased as punch that the figure was so low, but we’d love to get that as close to 0% as humanly possible, so we’re going to look at more ways we can help.

For starters, we have a new Community Support Assistant starting in April, whose main focus will be to answer any questions you may have and solve any difficulties as quickly as possible.

We also asked, if you had stopped running a Code Club, if there was anything we could have done to persuade you to stay, and this was the response:

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As you can see, you were keen to get more support in the local area and to have more events to connect with other volunteers.

Well, the good news is we are already making plans to help with this.

From April all regions will have a Coordinator working at least three days a week so they will be on hand to support you and run more events too. We’ll also continue to introduce more online events that everyone can join, like our monthly Twitter Chat.

Many of you said you were keen to get involved in competitions, so we will aim to introduce simple and fun competitions for the year ahead. We will also continue to promote Raspberry Pi competitions and develop special projects to increase the variety of activities you have available for your clubs.

We noted that some of you thought we could improve our communications and that volunteers needed more recognition. Both of these things are super important to us, so we’ll be coming up with lots of ways to address this.

Writing blogs responding to feedback is just one thing we are going to start doing more regularly, and we are also making sure that we have better communications specific to your local area with dedicated Twitter accounts and newsletters.

Finally, we can never thank Code Club volunteers enough for their dedication and commitment. Without you, there is no Code Club. So, thanks a million!

Feedback to give? We want to hear it! Drop us a line at hello@codeclub.org.uk

Can you help us get Newcastle coding?

With funding from a corporate sponsor, we are looking to offer free training on the computing curriculum for 200 teachers in the Newcastle area over the next few months, and we need your help.

The computing curriculum came into effect in England in September 2014, and teachers are now expected to teach computer science to children from ages 5 – 11 years old.  However, many teachers feel they have not had sufficient programming experience or training. Our goal is to train teachers, so that they feel confident and excited about delivering the new computing curriculum. Informed and inspiring teachers help develop great students who have computational thinking skills and have a thorough understanding of how technology works.

We are looking for volunteers who understand and are passionate about computer science, and who want to share their knowledge with local teachers. If this sounds of interest, we’d love to invite you to join us on May 14th, 9am – 4pm at Newcastle City Library for a workshop which will provide you with support and advice to help you run our teacher training sessions.

To find out more, get in touch with our team: hello@codeclubpro.org