Four ideas to support young coders’ creativity at home

While the UK and other countries are facing school closures and other restrictions, we wanted to share some thoughts and inspiration to help your Code Club, school, and family code from home.

What support is available? 

If you can move your Code Club sessions online, we have lots of support and guidance to help you on our Ways to run your club page. You can also join us at one of our online workshops, where you can share your experiences and learn best practices with the Code Club community.

If you can’t take your club sessions online at the moment, but would still like to offer fun and educational coding opportunities to your club members, here are four tried-and-tested ideas that are a hit with young learners! 

1. Pick a project to share with your club members

Find a project that is relevant to a topic that they have worked on at school, or that you know will spark an interest.

Here are some ideas:

Brain game — write a game to test your times tables

Focus on the prize — code a Scratch game in which concentration is key

Save the shark — create a game about saving sharks from ocean pollution 

You can access lots of other projects for free on the projects site.

2. Encourage your club members to design a game or app

You don’t need to be writing code to use your coding brain! Challenge young learners to become designers and develop their own game or app ideas. Learners can think of their own ideas, or you can set a design brief, like “create something to help the environment”.

Your club members can even develop their ideas for Coolest Projects 2021, an exciting online showcase of games, apps, and other tech projects made by young people all around the world!

We recommend using the Coolest Projects ideas workbook to encourage creative ideas. You can extend this design activity by inviting learners to create a storyboard or ‘pitch’ about their idea.

3. Send your club’s code to space with Astro Pi Mission Zero

What could be more ‘out of this world’ than writing code to run in space? 

In Astro Pi Mission Zero, young coders write a few lines of Python code to send a message to the astronauts on board the International Space Station. No special equipment is required — just a sense of adventure and a computer with an internet connection!

Find out who can take part, and check out the step-by-step instructions.

4. Take a look at our videos 

The Raspberry Pi Foundation has a YouTube channel filled with free, fun, and educational code-along videos.

Each week, Raspberry Pi educators and special guests invite young coders to take part in the Digital Making at Home live stream, to work through different coding projects. 

And there is support available for parents too! We have a range of support tutorials — from an intro to the Scratch programming language, to a guide to fixing errors in Scratch code — to help parents support young coders at home.

Let the Code Club team know which ideas capture your imagination on Twitter at Code Club UK or Code Club World and use the hashtag #MyCodeClub.