Code Club, between terms

Well one term finished and a new one not too far off at Malvern Wells Primary school. Looking back it's amazing to think what the children have covered at Code Club since the beginning of the year and how well they picked everything up. Not all the children learn at the same speed, but with a few nudges in the right direction everyone gets there. The Autumn term was all Scratch, and what a fantastic place to start. We covered everything from a cat chasing a mouse to fish chomping and racing across a desert to a simple drawing package. The children took everything in their stride, like giant knowledge sponges.

For the spring term, we changed direction a bit, looking at HTML & CSS. Gone was the wonderful drag and drop interface, replaced with a keyboard and commands to type. Would this put the children off? Would it not be as fun any more? I needn't have worried, they picked everything up at the same break neck speed and were soon coding HTML tags and CSS styles without an issue.

First they created their own "Lost Cat" web page, that definitely weren't identical pages. Each child brought their own creative skills to the task, interpreting it in their own way. For some colours and styles were important, expanding on what they had learnt while others brought their own flare to the text, expanding on their story of the lost cat. A real moment of achievement came when they found out that the pages they had created would be uploaded to the Internet using TeePee.io for the world to see. For such a small task the ability to have a URL they could take home to show their parents what they had created was a real reward for the children.

After this we moved onto hiding Ninjas around a town using positional CSS. This time there was different units of measure to get to grips with and after a bit of trial and error the concepts were grasped. Some of the children repeatedly tweaked their Ninjas positions to make sure that the smallest piece of hand or foot couldn't be seen while others placed all theirs in the same place resulting in a squash of Shinobis behind a skip!

Finally they got to use their creative skills to build their own website on any subject they wanted. Some took a topic areas that they had already covered in class while others embedded YouTube videos that they wanted to share. It really showed what they had learnt in such a short time.

I'm now looking forward to the Summer term and teaching the children Python, but this required a bit more planning. For the first term the school already had Scratch installed and for the second term we used notepad and the Chrome browser, but Python was something different. Luckily the school has a technician on rota and I got my request in for Python to be installed early enough so that by the end of the Spring term we were ready to go. It'll be an exciting time getting the children to put together what they have learnt in the first two terms. From Scratch they will be able to take all the programming concepts, loops, conditions and logic flow and combine that with the art of typing syntax (and making sure its right) that they learnt with HTML & CSS. Maybe even for the final lesson I might let them have play with Python and Minecraft on my Raspberry Pi, but this will be a surprise, so keep it under your hat.