An update (on our 2nd birthday)!

We turned two years old yesterday so we threw a party! Over 100 people came through the door to party with us – Scratch games made by our wonderful volunteers were played, cakes were eaten and drinks were drank (thanks so much to Twilio for those!)

We thought we’d give you a bit of an update about what has happened in the last year and what’s coming up in the future. It’s pretty long but that’s because there’s a lot happening!

The year gone by

A lot has happened in the last year. We’ve grown from one full time member of staff to a team of six. The number of Code Clubs has grown from 600 to over 2000 and continues to rise.

Since we started our aim has been to inspire children to build and share their ideas with the world. We think we’re doing pretty well at reaching lots of children but we’re not stopping now! We’re committed to giving as many children as possible the chance to learn to code in a fun and creative environment with high quality materials and enthusiastic, expert volunteers.

Our volunteers are so important to us: an army of programmers working with children all over the country, sharing their enthusiasm and knowledge. You can see some of them in this video we made and read about their experiences on our blog.

This year Linda and tef led on making our public projects page and facilitating contributions from our volunteers via GitHub. Clare and Parker worked hard to form lots of new partnerships which have raised funds to grow our team – this means we can give our volunteers more support, write new materials, improve our website and increase the number of clubs to get more children coding!

We’ve also created a new division of Code Club – called Code Club Pro – this delivers computing training to primary school teachers to get them ready for the new Computing curriculum.

People moving around

Laura, our former Growth Captain, has taken up the position of Managing Director of Code Club in the UK. Just a year ago she was an ICT Coordinator, getting her school coding, and now she’s getting the country coding (no big deal). This means Clare can focus on growing the Code Club movement around the world (world domination, no big deal).

Sam has moved from his volunteer support role to being our amazing General Manager – he’s keeping our finances in order and helping us plan for the future. We think he’s quite enjoying it (you should see his giant calculator!)

New team members

We have recently hired some amazing people. Michael, our Community Manager, has a background in training adults and runs a creative meet-up in his local area. When he’s not studying design and development with the Open University he is making cool stuff (the Pi robot he made was our fave). He’s totally nailing supporting our volunteers – if you haven’t met him yet then we’re sure you will soon.

We’ve welcomed Jonic to the Code Club team – he’s a pro developer who co-founded and runs Dot York. He’s helping us improve and expand our website with new and exciting features (news of those soon!) Of course, we still have great support from With Associates – they built our UK site and are currently working on the Code Club Pro site :)

We’re super psyched about the Head of Education we just hired – he is a computer scientist turned educator with 10 years of outstanding and innovative experience as a Computing teacher. He impressed us with his passion and knowledge and we’ll introduce him to you soon! It’s going to be so awesome to have someone with such strong pedagogical expertise on the team who will be entirely focused on our projects. We will continue to look to our volunteers for feedback and contributions.

If all that wasn’t exciting enough then we are also currently hiring National and Regional Coordinators so that we can make sure children in all areas of the UK get the chance to learn to code in a Code Club. We hope that these Coordinators will be people already running Code Clubs who are immersed in the developer communities in their area.

The year ahead

We want to maximise the learning (and FUN!) in our clubs and improve the experiences of our volunteers so we’ll be spending some time evaluating the impact Code Club has and improving all aspects of what we do.

We’ve got loads of exciting collaborations, meet-ups and other stuff planned – so watch this space! We look forward to continuing our journey with you all.

Love, peace and code – Team Code Club.