Priming Code Club


As part of my work with STEMnet, I recently signed up as a CodeClub volunteer at St. Bernadette's Catholic Primary School in Milton Keynes.  Working with Kate Clarke, the ICT leader at the school, I am going to be leading an after-school club that will introduce kids in Year 5 and Year 6 to the exciting world of programming.  CodeClub is a nationwide, volunteer driven, grass-roots movement to get kids learning about the fun that can be had programming computers, rather than simply using them.

In order to give the kids some idea about what they might be letting themselves in for, last week I delivered the short presentation (embedded above) at the school.  I started out by getting the kids to identify different computers, and think about what a computer really does, i.e. follows a set of instructions to complete a task.  We then played with a neat little iPad game called 'Kodable' which allows the player to program a character's journey through a maze.  I originally wanted to do this using the 'CargoBot' game, but found that it only works in portrait mode (and therefore a bit tricky to do on a landscape projection from my iPad!).  I ended with a short video showing a game developed in Scratch, which is the environment we will be using in the CodeClub sessions.

First session is due to run on 27th February.  Can't wait!

Comments

  1. Max10:53 AM

    Looks great! Can I use a version of that?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Arosha2:56 PM

      @Max, it seems I can't find your e-mail address on your Google profile, so perhaps you could DM it to me via twitter (@arosha) with a preference as to whether you want a Powerpoint / Keynote version? Sorry for the inconvenience.

      Delete

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