2020, A New Year Today was our first Code Club session for the year! First, I should point out a few differences from last year: One session per week This year, we’re running one session per week, which will be grades 5 and 6 for the first semester, and grades 3 and 4 for the second. Last year was grade 5/6 on Mondays and grades 3/4 on Thursdays, which was a bit harder to run and took more volunteers.

A few weeks on MakeCode Arcade MakeCode Arcade is something that we’ve been keen for the kids to try - a block-based 2D game programming framework in the browser. Where MakeCode Arcade differs from Scratch, is that it’s designed for creating 2D games, which can (optionally) can then be loaded on a variety of hardware. This was a great follow on from Moonhack and gave the kids time to have fun with some games, and allowed two of us to get in some planning time as well.

Since we now run two Code Clubs at our school, and I mostly attend the grade 5/6, information from the grade 3/4 sessions comes from talking to volunteers and teachers that attend. Grade 3/4 code club workshops We’re lucky enough to have great volunteers for the latter, which includes skills in both game design and machine learning. The earlier part of the year was spent trying to progress as much as we could with the Code Club Australia curriculum projects.