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

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.