Progression in Code Clubs: What matters to you?

Although Code Clubs are fun and informal, some clubs like to observe and track the progress that their members make. Over the summer, we consulted members of our global Code Club community to find out what you see and value as progress.

We also talked about the tools available to help you observe and celebrate progress. Here’s what you told us!

What kind of progress do you value seeing in your Code Club?

The progress that our community talked about most was growth in confidence and independence, followed closely by growth in “creativity and innovativeness”. 

Firstly, I want to see our learners being happy and enjoying the club. I like to see the students’ skills develop. I like to see them make their own things to build their skills beyond the tutorials. –Rhiwbina Library, Wales

The most interesting thing for us is to observe if students are changing the projects we propose, and if they are creating their own things away from the club. Also we’re interested in stimulating teacher confidence in using Code Club tools outside of the club environment. –Tagusvalley, Portugal

I’d like to see them code better and design applications that have direct application in the real world. –Faridabad, India

Our community also wanted to see coders “tackling and grasping more challenging concepts” as well as growing their  “problem solving, debugging, and critical thinking” skills.

I like to see the young people tackling increasingly complex projects, and having the confidence to move from Scratch to Python, or to try physical computing with Picos or micro:bits. –Cranmere Primary, England

What progress would you like to keep track of?

Clubs are interested in easy, automatic ways to track progress. The progress most clubs wanted to keep track of was young people’s development of “programming skills” followed by their progression through Code Club projects and pathways. 

I would like to be able to see what kinds of functions students were able to add to a program independently. For example, if a student used an if/else conditional appropriately or if they used a function that they created. – Dr Knox Middle School, Canada

Specific skills, such as using selection, sequence, repetition, and variables.
– Kingston St. Mary Primary School, UK

I’d like to see pupil progress along the various learning pathways. This can easily allow a club facilitator to know who’s progressing and at what pace. –Crosshall Junior School, UK

Other community members told us they were also interested in tracking the development of computational logic as well as learning confidence and independence; however, some were not keen on tracking at all. 

I don’t feel the need to track progress at all. It is a non-formal club, not a lesson. – Anonymous

Why track progress?

Our community members expressed a general consensus that tracking progress increased awareness of learners’ progression and several people discussed other positives to monitoring development.

For example, Fiona Lindsay from Hillside School in Scotland valued automatic tracking of individual progress as she felt this would give her a better appreciation of how each child is progressing and who is able to then support newer members of the club.

I’d really like an automatic track of where they are in a project, so I can monitor this, to help me keep better track of where each pupil or pair actually is in their learning journey.

Meanwhile, Sue Gray from Fakenham Library said she uses a spreadsheet to see who has attended her club, how often they’ve come, and what projects they’ve already done. This has helped her to see who is ready to move on to the Introduction to Python path or other projects beyond the Introduction to Scratch pathway.

Similarly, Nick Nurock from Thomas’s Academy felt it would be helpful to receive an automatic reminder of which blocks or commands had been used successfully in a previous week so as to know which concepts to move onto (or remain on) in the following week. 

How to track progress in your Code Club

One way to follow your members’ progress is to create pupil accounts. These enable young people’s work to be saved, so you and they can revisit projects and see how much they have progressed.

You can use Scratch accounts to save projects on our Scratch pathways and Raspberry Pi accounts or Trinket accounts to save projects on our Python and Web design pathways. With a Raspberry Pi account, learners’ progress is tracked automatically through all our pathways. Find out more about this on our digital progress tracking FAQ.

You spoke…we listened! More ways to celebrate progress

We’re excited to share two new resources that we’ve developed in response to some of the needs expressed by members during our community consultations. We hope that they will help you to observe and celebrate progress in your club — no matter how small!

1. The Unique Feedback certificate is blank and editable. You can tailor it to whatever is valuable to you, to recognise and celebrate your learners.
2. The accounts permissions letter: this is a template letter for you to obtain parental permission for learners to use accounts during or outside of Code Club sessions. We’ve updated it to include the Raspberry Pi Foundation Code Editor and Raspberry Pi accounts so you can use the automatic tracking features to monitor your learners’ progress. This editable version of the accounts permission letter can be sent to parents by email, while this printable version can be printed and filled out manually.

We hope that these two new resources will help you keep track of what matters to you. If you have another way to monitor progress that you’d like to share with us, you can contact us at [email protected]