Parents

Five ways to inspire your club members about code!

Whether your Code Club is just launching or has been running for a while, here are five ways for you to get your Code Club members excited about coding

A young girl is sat in a classroom working at laptop. A female volunteer is looking at her laptop screen. Both are smiling!
A young Code Club member showing her code to a volunteer.

1. Make Scratch Cat say hi! 

Just starting out with new Code Club members? Christina from Code Club USA encourages you to begin with the basics:  

“We often forget that the simplest things can inspire folks — start with the basics! Show your Code Club members how to make Scratch Cat say hi, and then have them change what the cat is saying and encourage them to try and make the cat do a dance.”

– Christina Foust, Club Program Manager, Code Club USA

2. Be ready, inspiration is contagious!

Make sure you are the first one to be inspired: join us at a FREE online webinar and make sure you’re #CodeClubReady! Talk to our team from across the world, ask your questions, and find out what support we’ve got for you. 

An illustration with too robots, the Code Club logo and words, we are #CodeClubReady

3. Send your code to space

How cool would it be to have your own code run aboard the International Space Station? Your Code Club members can do just that with the European Astro Pi Challenge!  

The Astro Pi Challenge has launched with two missions.

  • Mission Zero: With the help of a step-by-step guide, your Code Club members write a very simple Python program that will run on the International Space Station and show a message for the astronauts there! This mission is a great introduction to Python for learners who want to move on from Scratch. 
  • Mission Space Lab: participants design and write a program for a real scientific experiment that has the chance to run aboard the International Space Station. This mission has four phases and runs over eight months. 
An illustrated image with the Astro Pi logo, two astronauts and the launch date details.

4. Encourage a show-and-tell 

Hold a show-and-tell session to celebrate you club members’ achievements! You can even invite your club members’ friends and family and teach them about coding by having the club members showcase what they’ve been creating and learning. If your Code Club is registered on our website, download certificates from your dashboard to hand out to your members at the end of the show-and-tell to make it really special. 

“A show-and-tell is a great place for your club members to share what they’ve learned and also talk about anything they found challenging. It leads to great discussions and encourages the other children to ask further questions.”

– Rohima Cooke, Code Club Regional Coordinator, South East 

An older ladies hands working on a laptop, drawing a person on the laptop screen.
A family member taking part in a show-and-tell session

5. Build your own game

Who doesn’t love to play games at home? Inspire your learners to create and code their own games. With our free step-by-step projects for Scratch, Python, and Blender, children can easily learn how to make games. You never know, you may have the next Tim Sweeney, game developer of Fortnite, in your group!

How do you get your Code Club members excited about coding? Share your ideas with us on Facebook and Twitter using the hashtag #MyCodeClub.

#VolunteersWeek – Run a Code Club to learn new skills & meet new friends

This #VolunteersWeek, we celebrate by sharing the experiences of the amazing people who help to inspire children across the UK to get excited about coding and digital making. Amanda Coffey is a parent and she runs a Code Club at Firfield Primary School. We spoke to her about how she got involved with Code Club, and what she has gained from volunteering at her local school. Here is what she told us:

sam_1532-e1496317446153.jpg“I was inspired to volunteer when I was talking to another mum, Jasjit, in the playground and she started telling me about Code Club. It sounded really interesting. I am not a coder, but I had dabbled in the past. For me, coding wasn’t a scary thing, it was just something I hadn’t learnt, but I knew that most of my peers didn’t feel the same way: they were scared of coding. I wanted my children to grow up seeing coding as just another tool, not something scary, but I didn’t know enough to teach them. So when I heard about Code Club, it sounded perfect.

That day I went to my running club and was talking to Ian, the coach, telling him what Jasjit had told me about Code Club, and he was really interested as well. So together the three of us started a club at our school. We have been great friends ever since.

Our Code Club has been running for almost two years. We have between 16 and 18 pupils each week, with a teacher from the school there for support. The club is oversubscribed with a waiting list, we had to put names in a hat in order to choose who could come! I think the reason we have so many pupils wanting to come and code is because we ran a celebration assembly last year, where we were able to share our children’s coding projects with the rest of the school and to hand out certificates. We are lucky that our head teacher values coding enough to give us that opportunity. It is not just parents that don’t know what coding is – the children don’t know either, so inviting them to a Code Club means nothing to them. Showing the whole school the different projects the first batch of Code Clubbers had been able to try taught every child what coding is and how much fun it can be.

I am lucky enough to be a stay-at-home mum at the moment, so I have time to run a Code Club. But I’ve been volunteering for different causes for years. If you haven’t tried it before, give it a go. With Code Club the projects are already made for you, so you don’t have to spend hours planning. It is a very easy club to run. You really will love it.

By volunteering with Code Club, I met two of my best friends, Jas and Ian. I just spent Mother’s Day running a half-marathon with Jas, and she is trying to teach me to cook proper Dal, whilst Ian and I share music and books. It’s been such a rewarding experience running our club together. I love showing the children new things and seeing them getting excited.  They always have the best ideas for what to make and by supporting them I am learning so much.”

Interested in volunteering with Code Club? Find out more on our website.