Girl holds a laptop showing a coding project while smiling woman beside her holds a sign reading “we made this”.

“We made this!” Discovering the power of agency in your Code Club

Explore how empowering young people to choose their projects, topics, or programming languages can lead to more engaged Code Club creators who believe their actions make a real difference.

What do we mean by ‘agency’?

At Code Club, giving young people agency means fostering a culture where creators are driven and self-motivated to direct their own growth through their passion for coding.

What are the advantages?

By giving creators agency, you’ll create a more meaningful learning experience. If you allow your creators to work on ideas they care about, their curiosity becomes the foundation for them to develop their coding skills.

We want creators to feel empowered at Code Club and to open up opportunities for them to feel that their voice and their actions can make a difference. This is one way to encourage them to become more engaged and confident. But giving your creators agency doesn’t mean giving up control entirely; help from mentors is essential to getting your creators started in these steps towards independence. Of course, they will also need your guidance and feedback to make lasting progress.

“You can see on their faces when they are creating something from zero that they feel like magicians. They start to create their own things because we have given them the tutorials to follow the steps; they create new things and bring their own projects and new ideas to us!”
– Iliana Ramirez, Code Club Partner, Mexico City

Two children smile while working together at laptops in a busy Code Club. — Use our projects to create games, animations, and much more

So, how can you give your creators agency?

Adding choice to your Code Club sessions can be really simple. Creators volunteer to come to Code Club, and so they have already made their first decision: to follow one of their interests. Once they have arrived, there is no right way to learn to code, so each creator can discover their own path.

Here are three easy ways you could help your creators take ownership of their learning journey at your next session:

1. Projects

Try offering three project ideas and letting creators team up to work on the one they each like best. You could also let creators choose any project they like from our project site.

Offer your creators a thrilling change of pace with these three projects:

‘Silly eyes’ is a Scratch project that gives creators the freedom to create their own silly eyes character. The character’s large, silly eyes will follow the mouse pointer and bring the character to life.

‘Teach a machine’ is part of our AI toolkit path. Creators use a webcam and machine learning to train a computer to tell them how many fingers they are holding up.

Get ready to play and share all the best tunes on the BBC micro:bit with ‘Music Player’. Your creators don’t even need the physical micro:bit to try this one.

We have over 200 coding projects to choose from, and each supports creators to learn at their own pace and grow their confidence.

2. Topic or theme

Why not challenge your creators to agree on a theme for the next Code Club session and create projects that link to the topic? Mentors can then encourage them to share how their projects link to the theme at the end of the session and vote on the next theme together.

A topic can be anything that your creators are interested in, such as animals, a favourite sport, or a seasonal festival.
You can link our projects to any topic with a bit of imagination. A volcano theme might lead to adapting Boat Race to create a game where you can’t touch the lava. You will find that your creators have lots of ideas!

3. Computing language

Give your creators a choice of which computing language they use through our project paths. Each path is a collection of six projects that cover a set of skills needed for a particular piece of hardware or software alongside design and engineering skills.

Provide your creators with the information they need to make a choice from a number of different project paths and let them explore the ones that interest them the most.

It is important that creators start at the ‘Introduction to…’ level if they are new to the software or hardware being covered.

Start exploring the Code Club projects site and give your creators the agency to make projects they care about at your next Code Club session.

A group of people participate in a coding workshop. A person wearing a black shirt with "code club" written on the back is seated in the foreground. Several laptops are on the table, with participants engaging in programming activities. White digital icons, including lightbulbs, graphs, and a globe, decorate the image

Check out these updates to the Code Club platform

We’ve introduced new features to help club leaders manage events, track attendance, and communicate more effectively. These updates make running your club easier, so you can focus on supporting young creators.

Easily check in and check out creators

Club leaders can now use the platform to check creators in and out as they arrive and leave events. This feature helps you keep track of attendance in real-time to help you organise larger groups and keep everyone attending safe if there is a fire alarm. After an event, you can also look back and see who attended and who didn’t.

New search and filter options

Managing larger groups of attendees is now easier with the search and filter feature. You can quickly find specific creators and filter by status. The three groups you can filter by are:

Not arrived – Creators who haven’t arrived.
Checked in – Creators currently at the event.
Checked out – Creators who have left.

Email attendees who booked tickets

Need to send a reminder or communicate a change to the event? You can message all attendees who have booked tickets to an upcoming event directly from the Code Club platform. Whether you want to share changes to event details or provide information on resources in advance, it’s now quick and hassle-free. You can even use markdown to format your message.

Special assistance flag

When booking into an event, parents/carers can share any special assistance a creator might need to join the event or access the venue. In the ‘manage attendees’ section, you will see any needs they might have under the creator’s name as a flag icon with the word ‘Assistance’ beside it. To see more details, click on the name of the young person and the type of assistance they require will be visible.

A user interface card displaying information about Jill Hill, age 12. It includes two selectable options: "Work on my own project" and "Assistance," with the latter highlighted. In the top right corner, there are three buttons: a cross (X), a checkmark (✔) highlighted in green, and an arrow pointing right. — Special assistance flag feature

Find resources you need quicker

We’ve reorganised the resources section on our website to make it easier for you to find the resources you need. Whether you’re looking for activities, certificates, or resources for planning an upcoming session, everything is now structured to make it more accessible.

A webpage from Code Club featuring a "Resources" section with a green banner that reads, "Our resources are designed to help you start, manage, and grow your club." Below, a "Browse by category" section displays three colorful icons: a green box with code brackets and a cursor, a pink box with a lightbulb, and a blue box with a magnifying glass over a person icon. — Resources on the Code Club website

Expanding language options

The Code Club website, including our platform features, is available in five languages. These are Dutch, English, French, Japanese and Welsh. We will soon be adding resources in these languages as well as Greek translations to further support our global community. A huge thank you to our volunteer community of translators who share their skills to make Code Club accessible to more young people around the world!

Thank you to our volunteer community of translators

These updates are designed to help you manage your club more efficiently, so mentors can focus on providing a great experience to creators.

Log in now and explore these new features! If you have any feedback about the platform or website, please email support@codeclub.org.

Get your Code Club coding with AI and ML

Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) are transforming the world around us, and it’s more important than ever for young people to understand this technology.

By introducing AI and ML concepts in your Code Club, you can equip your members with essential skills for the future, spark their creativity, and empower them to become responsible users of AI technologies.

Code Club’s AI projects make exploring AI and ML a blast. You can learn more about the projects in our ‘Taking your first steps into AI’ blog. With hands-on activities and fun challenges, they’re the perfect way to spark a passion for these exciting technologies.

“The AI learning path gives kids an understanding of the different ways AI fits into our world, whether they’re looking at photo recognition or my favourite project ‘Doodle detector’, where we get to draw and decide what our picture is. All of these feed into how young people understand the way AI works, and getting in early gives them a deep understanding of how that can work to help them in the future, and what to look for so that they don’t get caught out by it.”
– Kaye North, Code Club Australia

Project options for every club

New to AI? Start with the ‘Doodle detector’

If you’re new to AI, the Doodle detector is a great project to start with. You don’t need any special kit, just a computer. Creators draw different objects, then train an ML model to recognise their drawings. It’s a fun way for creators to see for themselves how model training works.

Can the model detect an apple? A banana? A cat? A caterpillar? Gather your Code Club and put it to the test!

Limited connectivity? No problem!

In our unplugged Dinosaur decision tree project, creators explore how ML models use decision trees to sort things into groups.

This project uses a paper-based decision tree to classify dinosaurs, but you could classify anything.

Short on time? Create an AI image

Need a quick and creative activity? Try our ‘AI-generated images’ project and produce amazing AI images with Adobe Firefly. Your creators will learn how to write text prompts and then watch as generative AI brings their creations to life.

This project uses Adobe Firefly, which requires an Adobe ID. You must be 13 or older to register for an individual Adobe ID.

Got a microphone? Use your voice!

In the Fish food project, creators train an ML model to recognise voice commands and then play a fun fish-feeding game using their commands. You’ll need a microphone for this one. Want to feed a giraffe or a penguin instead? Go for it!

More advanced coders? Level up with a large language model

Your more advanced Code Club creators can learn how to run a large language model on their Raspberry Pi and create a powerful AI assistant using Ollama.

This project is not recommended for learners below the age of 13 and we encourage Code Club creators to engage with this material responsibly.

New AI safety resources

The Raspberry Pi Foundation has released new AI safety resources that equip educators with the tools to empower learners to question AI technologies, think critically, and use AI technologies responsibly. The AI safety resources allow for flexible learning and have been built around three key components: animations, unplugged activities, and discussion questions.

Head to the Code Club projects page to find these projects and more! Don’t be afraid to experiment and have fun. Who knows? Your Code Club might just create the next big thing in AI!

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