I’ll be running the code club at Ridgeway Primary school Croydon again this year and we’re starting on the week after half term. Parents of year 6 have received an email this week inviting children to join the beginners level class. Hopefully later in the year we’ll also be running intermediate classes for children who have already completed term 1 with us. This will be great if we can then get multiple development level tracks started.
This is the text that the school use to advertise the class, i think it’s really well and succinctly put:
We are running a Ridgeway Code Club. Behind every app on a SmartPhone, every game that you play and every website you view, someone has spent time programming it. Code Club teaches children the basics of computer programming through fun and creative projects that also encourages problem solving skills. You can find out more at www.codeclub.org.uk
I can’t wait to get started again. Apparently the school have upgraded their IT suite during the summer, which should prove interesting. As for any event I run I’ll be sure to go into the suite beforehand to check out the equipment and ensure it all still works. It’ll be interesting to see whether they’ve upgraded to Windows 7 or not, as they were running XP when I was there before the summer.
I think I’ll probably be running with the old scratch as well again this term, depending on how the browser performance is with the new kit, and also how their new security settings are configured. I think this will be a choice for many clubs this year. I certainly love the new browser based scratch, and the web cam interaction, but many schools will either not have the hardware to support this, or would purposefully block it for security reasons.
