A Quick Recap on Last Year Last year was great. We put together some fun projects, including whack-a-mole and a micro:bit plant, and we had a couple of groups get further in Python than we’d ever been in previous years. Keeping track of students’ progress really helped us get an idea of what concepts were being learned and also levelled the playing field in terms of giving both the louder and quieter kids a go at more advanced projects, based on what skills they’d learned rather than how loudly they expressed that they wanted to move on.

After making a few changes to the running of our code club this year, it’s nice to get a chance to sit back and reflect on how it all went. In previous posts, I’ve tried to brain-dump as we progressed - with some of my immediate thoughts and reactions to each month, or two..depending on how much was going on. We had varying levels of success with some of the changes, so I thought it useful to go over some of the year’s highlights as we see out 2017.

This year brought a few changes to how we’re running our local Code Club. In addition to having our largest group yet, this year we have the most volunteers we’ve ever had. With these challenges, we seem to manage to stay aware of individual skill levels in students, and seen volunteers grow their skills as well. I thought it might be useful to sit down to reflect on how things are going, and try and share some insights into things that seem to work for us, and talk about some of our experiences and issues we deal with.