Redesigning our fun Although I wrote about the Python side of today’s session at Code Club, it’s worth talking about everything else. Since we’d had the couple of weeks off, we took this opportunity to take a breath and look at how we could get everyone excited again, and improve a few components. A few observations from previous Code Club sessions this year: It worked better when we used our round tables for Python, rather than last year’s outward facing seating We ultimately wanted people to offer enough activities that kids could choose - People seemed more focussed when we had defined areas in our open plan set up for each activity People seemed more comfortable when they could see what others were doing, and not feel tethered to only one What we did today Today was set up like this:

Today was a great Code Club session. Some of us have been finding the Python progress a bit slow so far, with not much reward, with some concepts seemingly hard to grasp. And that’s fair enough, because text-based tic tac toe, or trying to say that older adventure games are fun, really doesn’t compare to the cool feedback of an iPad or the more visual games we create with Scratch. So turning it all around today, we dived into the Python level-based challenge that I came across last week.

Game creation platforms we’re currently using at our Code Club We’ve seen a few great games coming out of Code Club. So far we’ve been using Scratch but we also have a class set of Stencyl licences. Stencyl isn’t covered by Code Club, but there’s some lessons to get started here. Differences between Scratch and Stencyl Scratch has a simple interface, making it quite a lot easier to get started with for those who haven’t programmed before.