Club members make micro:bits into lucky charms

On an island off the eastern coast of Canada, one Code Club has been getting creative with micro:bits. Club leader Michelle spoke to us about the benefits of bringing code to life with physical computing.

Random Island Academy Code Club

Code you can hold

At Random Island Academy Code Club in Hickman’s Harbour, Newfoundland, club members have recently been making the jump from block coding with Scratch to physical computing.

To celebrate St Patrick’s Day, the club coded micro:bits — microcontrollers that can be programmed to do tasks such as lighting up LEDs and measuring temperature — and put them inside shamrocks made of card and paper. Students coded the micro:bits to display lucky messages using the skills they had learned in their club. Some students even made interactive games as part of the project.

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Creating ‘ah-ha’ moments

Club leader Michelle thinks that there are a lot of benefits to encouraging children to learn to code.

“I really love the ‘ah-ha’ moments, when it clicks and the student experiences success in their code. They work so hard, fail, try again, and again, and again, and when they finally get it, the happiness in their eyes and the smile on their faces tell me it is worth every minute of volunteering my time.”
– Michelle, Code Club leader

Moving code from a screen and into the real world has also had an impact:

“The students really put their problem-solving strategies to task as they work through this project. They are finding coding micro:bits much more rewarding than simply writing code on the computer. The fact that they have a tangible piece [of technology] holding their very own code astounds them!”
– Michelle, Code Club leader

Got micro:bits? Get coding!

If you have micro:bits and want to use them in your Code Club, then head on over to our micro:bit projects for ideas. If you’ve been inspired by the Random Island Academy Code Club, you could start with our Fortune Teller project and adapt it to display your own lucky messages.

Share your creations with us on Facebook and Twitter — we’d love to see them! To find out more about Code Club in Canada, visit www.codeclub.ca.