This is the hub of where I will put all Coding Club resources: the Powerpoints, code and extras you may need to complete the particular project we are working on.
For the purpose of others passing (curious folks, ICT teachers or web crawlers), Coding Club is a weekly extra-curricular activity that takes place at an unnamed Devon school. I am a strong believer that every school should give its students the opportunity to learn Computer Science and programming outside of normal curriculum time. In the ICT lessons of many schools, despite best efforts of teachers, the level of challenge in the programming taught much be targeted at the average ability of the class. There are inevitably going to be folks who aren't interested in programming and that's fine. However, the highly speciailised and complex nature of Computer Science means that normal ICT lessons can't push everyone too far past the class average. As a result, talented youngsters often don't get stretched far beyond if statements and while loops. Furthermore, unlike other subjects like sports and arts, I find programming is really hard to self-teach. You can see why this leaves us between a rock and a hard place teaching programming and Computer Science. ICT classes should really be setted. I have been lucky to have brilliant ICT teachers who have prepared extra material to push me and help me improve.
The provision of a 'Coding Club' at any school is undoubtably beneficial. Our regulars (although small in number) have become very talented programmers as you can see from our past projects. Since lanuching Coding Club, there has been an exponential increase in the number of people taking Computer Science for GCSE and my unnamed school is hopefully offering an A Level soon. Looking at the room on a Friday lunchtime, you'd think the club is completely futile - we rarely have more than ten people. Coding Club is not yet perfect: sometimes I astronomically overshoot the difficulty through blindly scrambling a session together at 1am the previous night. But, nevertheless, every single one is a genius Computer Scientist, becoming more passionate in advocating the subject by the day and makes our school a proud and prosperous place to be.
If you work or study at a secondary school (or primary, I suppose - also used to run an ICT club at a simmilarly unnamed primary school), then for goodness sake set up a Coding Club of some sort. Use the resources here to start you off!
If you are from my school, then come to Coding Club: I assure you that it is great fun and you will learn loads!
If you are already a member of Coding Club, then thank you. You make my life and the school a fantastic place to be.
~ Michael