14th November 2012
Help our hack (please!)
We’re going to give 100 developers a Raspberry-Pi, 24 hours and electricity, wifi and food and ask them to each create a Code Club project that use a Raspberry-Pi. The aim of the game is to create something that a 9-11 year old could make themselves. We’ll write the projects up in child friendly language …
25th October 2012
Fun with squishy circuits
I recently saw this excellent TED video about how to teach the basics of electricity to children using electricity conducting playdough and letting them be circuit designers, and decided to try it out. The dough can be hooked up to all kinds of fun stuff including LEDs, motors, arduinos, MaKey MaKeys etc. Playdough can be …
19th September 2012
Our five month birthday
Five months ago on the 16th of April we launched Code Club with a single tweet. We thought we’d start small and have about 20 schools by the end of the year but the response we had to that tweet has been amazing. We had so many schools signing up to take part in our …
19th September 2012
Brighton Digital Festival and Scratch workshops
In September we took part in the Brighton Digital Festival at two different events. The first was Brighton Mini Maker Faire at the Brighton Dome. It was a fantastic event with loads of wicked robots and people having a go at making both digital and non-digital THINGS. We had a little stall and were swamped …
8th August 2012
We’re gonna need a bigger boat
Holy guacamole Batman! This is what we said to ourselves this morning when we realised we have 122 schools ready to start Code Club in September. That’s a lot. We have done our best to provide as much information as possible on our new website but we know that schools and volunteers will have questions …
1st August 2012
A slight change of plan
When we first started Code Club, though we had a strong sense of what we needed to achieve and how important it is to get kids into coding, we didn’t know the best way to set up an organistion to do it. We did what we thought was best and tried to register as a …
27th June 2012
Gladiators, you will go on my first whistle…
Today we’ve sent out instructions to all those who had signed up to be a volunteer to start a Code Club at their local primary school. Just incase you hadn’t signed up yet you can find all the instructions on the Volunteers page of our website. Good luck Code Clubbers! P.S Just incase you don’t …
27th June 2012
The making of THAT video
On the 21st June we headed to The Grove Hotel just outside Watford for Founders Forum. It’s an annual gathering of successful internet entrepreneurs who come together to learn from each other. There is a good write up of the event here on Wired. Founders Forum had invited us to come and challenge the delegates …
25th June 2012
User testing and pilot scheme update
On the 26th of May we headed to Camden to join Mozilla and CoderDojo at their play test event, kindly hosted by Forward Internet group. They lent us their schedule and their kids so we could test out the first six Code Club projects we had been working so hard on writing. This play test …
4th May 2012
And so it begins
Last night I had one of the most enjoyable meetings in my short(ish) life. Linda and I headed to Mozilla HQ (who had kindly lent us their big meeting room) to meet the the newest members of Team Code Club who we’d asked to help us write the curriculum for Code Club’s first term. Neil Smith …
