We love Croydon Tech City. They are a growing community of software developers, venture capitalists, technologists, startup founders and creatives who are passionate about the next generation’s skills. They love Code Club as they know how much it will help children in their area learn such skills and kick start a passion for technology to last them a lifetime. They were one of the first groups in the country to decide that all their schools needed a club and have been working tirelessly to spread the word and make this happen.

On Saturday 30th November at 10am at the BRIT School, Croydon Tech City will be holding its first Future Tech City event – a drive to get a Code Club into every primary school in Croydon; and prepare South London secondary schools for the exciting world of computer programming. We think you should all go because over the course of three hours, you will learn:

• Why young people should learn coding skills
• The benefit of coding for youth employability and personal development
• How Croydon Tech City could deliver a Code Club in your primary school.

The event is open to all South London primary AND secondary teachers, Headteachers, governors and parents and you do not need to know anything about computers to attend!

To register to attend, please email Croydon Tech City with your name and the South London school you are affiliated with.

Speakers on the day include:

John O’Donovan (CTO, Financial Times)
Matt Gaunt (Google Chrome Developer)
Debbie Forster (MD, Apps For Good)
Emma Mulqueeny (Founder, Young Rewired State)
Theo Blackwell (Councillor, Camden Labour Party)

 

This week we packed our bags and headed up to Scotland for the first of a series of workshops in schools that we are doing with our pals at Google.

Over the next few months we’ll be travelling all over the UK to different primary schools and showing a group of 9-11 year olds how to make a fun game using Scratch. As if this wasn’t cool enough, we are also going to be hosting a local MP at each workshop too! We’re hoping that they’ll be impressed when they see a Code Club in action and will help us with our mission to find more volunteers to run Code Clubs.

The first workshop was today at Auchinairn Primary in East Dunbartonshire. The students loved making our game Whack A Witch and impressed us all with their quick pace of learning and positive attitudes. Jo Swinson MP popped in to say hello as well; we think she was impressed as we saw her tweet this later on:

Whilst we’re heading to all these schools we’re taking the opportunity to hold a meet-up for current/potential volunteers and teachers the evening before. Check out our events list for more information about these. Let the roadshow commence!

Code Club have over 1300 clubs in the UK now. That’s 1300 people kindly giving up their time to teach kids to code. This is a pretty incredible thing for them to do and it warms our hearts just thinking about how awesome they all are.

We travelled up and down the country filming some of them so they could tell you what it is really like and this is the result:

Thanks to Sonny Malhotra for making this awesome video!

On the flip side of this are the 500+ schools who want to have a Code Club but haven’t yet found a volunteer. Because of this we’ve put volunteer recruitment to the very top of our agenda so that no children miss out.

A couple of months back we did a survey where we asked developers what was stopping them from volunteering. Here’s what they said:

So we’ve set about tackling these issues. Firstly, we’re telling employers all over the country about Code Club and asking them to give their developers time out of their day to run a club. This seems to be working and even huge companies like Google and Morgan Stanley are into it!

Secondly, we’re working on ways of letting volunteers communicate through our website. This will be great for busy people because they’ll be able to talk to others in their area and get a team together to run a club at their local venue. This will be less time intensive for them – think of it as a club time-share! We are also going to be preparing some online materials which will help people learn about working with kids and how to use Scratch.

Whilst you are waiting for all of this to take shape we’d encourage you to head along to one of our upcoming meet-ups (see list below). These are a way for us to say thank you to our current volunteers and meet new ones. If you’re on the fence about volunteering then it’s a great chance for you to meet some people already doing it and pick their brains! If we’re not making it to you in 2013 then look out in 2014 as, chances are, we’ll be with you then.

Code Club organised meet-ups:

Glasgow
West Midlands
London
Reading
Birmingham
Kent

Volunteer organised meet-ups:

Brighton
Leeds