Our wonderful Head of Education Rik has been hard at work updating the Code Club Scratch curriculum in the past few weeks. Here’s a quick look at the new projects he’s developed:

	Memory — memorise and repeat a sequence of random colours!
	Dodgeball — a platform game, in which you have to dodge the moving balls and reach the end of the level.
	Brain Game — a times table quiz, in which you have to get as many answers correct as you can in 30 seconds.
	Catch the Dots — a clone of a great game called ‘Gyro’. Match the dots to the correct part of the controller.
	Clone Wars — use lightning bolts to save the Earth from space-monsters.
	Create Your Own World — learn how to create your own open-world adventure game!

We hope you have loads of fun with our new projects — why not get in touch and let us know how you get on with them? :)

Code Club and Into Film have teamed up to create a fantastic new coding resource, Code, Create and Animate. Designed to help you make use of the language of film, this new resource, packed full of fun and engaging activities, will help young coders create an exciting, filmic scratch animation.

The partnership will provide opportunities for children across the UK to build upon skills currently taught in Computing lessons. By combining the mediums of filmmaking and coding, young people will improve their knowledge and develop skills of description, deduction and inference, whilst fixing bugs and solving problems, extending their programming knowledge.

Once registered, you will be able to access this exciting resource, which includes lesson plans, activities and PowerPoint presentations, and clubs will also be provided with a diverse selection of animated films on DVD to accompany these sessions. This selection of films has been specially chosen, and each are perfectly suited to teaching children about different facets of film, as well as being entertaining in their own right.

Virgin Media Shorts People’s Choice Winner ‘inaniMATE’ will teach an understanding of the creation of narrative; Brazilian short ‘Ernesto’ will help children appreciate how sound affects a story, in particular the use of Foley sound; and ‘The Storyteller’, based on an Indian myth, will focus on the use of colour and setting within animation. There is also a session looking at video-games and movies, using film club favourite Wreck-It Ralph.

Coders and young people will take the lessons learnt from viewing these diverse animations and be able to apply them to their own scratch animations or filmmaking projects.

You can gain access to this resource and the DVD that accompanies it by registering here!

Hardware hijinks!

We love to hear about what’s going on in all of our clubs, from cool game innovations through to hardware experiments, by way of digital art and robots!

If you’d like some hardware for your club but aren’t really sure how to go about it, you should know Hubbub is a great way to crowdfund for educational tech and all Code Clubs can start a campaign. :D

It’s super simple:

1. Decide what hardware you’d like to get for your club
2. Set up a crowdfunding page on Hubbub and check out their advice for a successful campaign
3. Promote your campaign to raise the funds
4. Buy the hardware for your Code Club
5. Awesome tech is a-go!

We have a list of programmable hardware we think can be really great for Code Clubs if you need any inspiration (with a list of prices, to help you work out what makes best sense for you), and our friends at Hubbub have a great academy to help you make your campaign a success.

You can find lots more details over on our website. (The first of the Code Club and Technology Will Save Us DIY Gamer Kit projects are also now available; that’s also a really brilliant piece of hardware to consider!)

Adventures in code…

Whilst everyone was in a flurry of buying new shoes and stationery sets ready for the new school term, and getting things ready for the lots of Code Clubs to kick off, we were giving out database a spring/summer clean (you may well have had an email from us asking for a club status update), moving from the lovely TechHub offices in Old Street to our new home in Bethnal Green, and preparing to welcome a few new members of staff in September.

Our Code Club community wasn’t lazing the summer away either, oh no. Some were preparing for a term of DIY Gamer club sessions, others were involved in YRS Festival of Code (supporting and coding!), and one code clubber gave his time to help other young people at The Story Museum in Oxford.

Alex took what he’d learnt from a year of Code Club sessions to help 7 participants in a digital storytelling workshop after the museum put out a call for volunteers on Twitter. He told us that the most difficult and most interesting part of being Scratch Expert and Debugger Extraordinaire were challenging questions which made him think hard about the best way to advise the workshop participants: helping other people with their coding is a great way to develop your own skills too!

You can take a look at the work Alex has been doing on one of his own games over here, and if you’d like to tell us about your own adventures in coding please do get in touch. :)