Football fever is spreading across the globe, and your Code Club can join in the fun too.
We’ve rounded up 3 football-inspired projects that let creators score goals, design kits, and predict winners — all while building their coding skills. Which one will you set as a challenge in your Code Club?
Beat the goalie
Can you beat the keeper? In ‘Beat the goalie’, you build a Scratch football game where you aim, kick, and try to score a goal before time runs out. Add sounds and scoring as you explore key presses, sprite interactions, sensing, variables, and game logic.
Kit chooser
Create the ultimate team look in ‘Kit chooser’, where you design your own football strip in Scratch using colours, patterns, and custom styling. Turn kit design into code as you work with sprites, costumes, broadcasts, variables, loops, and conditionals.
Match predictor
Who will win the World Cup? In ‘Match predictor’, you use a micro:bit to build a gadget that randomly predicts the winner of a football match. Choose your teams, test your code in MakeCode, and explore button input, lists, randomness, strings, and transferring code onto physical hardware.
Celebrate success with certificates
Every great tournament ends with a celebration! Encourage club members to share their completed projects and award certificates to recognise their creativity, teamwork, and problem-solving.
We have a selection of ‘recognition certificates’ perfect for these football themed projects:
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.
Choose from hundreds of Code Club projects, in up to 30 languages
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
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
‘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
‘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.
Music Player
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.
Explore the Code Club projects
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.
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.
Start exploring Code Clubs AI projects
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!
Doodle detector
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.
AI-generated project
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.
Prompt a large language model
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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