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.

Python programming for grades 5/6

Last year we had a few projects that were block-based for the grade 5/6 group, and most of us felt that we didn’t really capitalise as much on the Python learned from the Code Club Australia curriculum. I’ve been working with the IT guy and we should have Python pip working through the school proxy. This means we can install Python3 libraries and really expand what we can do, and use some of the other projects I’ve written, including a flask exercise. This really opens the door to being able to use more blended projects as well, to encompass artistic and creative components.

Keeping track of everyone’s progress

In previous years, we tried a few methods to understand where everyone was up to in the Code Club curriculum so we could provide the right challenges later. One year we had some success using a software suite that the school had, to get kids to log their progress. This year, three of us will be logging to a shared Spreadsheet on Google sheets. This should give us redundancy in case one of us can’t make it one week, and also leave the kids free to work on coding! We missed doing this last year - which made it a lot harder to tailor later workshops to students’ skills.

Planning ahead with a shared calendar

We actually set this up a few years ago but never used it - a Google calendar means that we can plan projects weeks ahead and keep abreast of holidays, school camps, and other activities. This will make us more efficient, since we can even plan when volunteers and teachers are away, and focus on filling any gaps with relevant activities. This even lets us set student expectations because we know what is coming up - so far we’ve put in two weeks for Moonhack, and rescheduled last week’s activities to this week. Another idea which worked previously to help kids break through some problems they had, was to set aside a couple of weeks for “catching up” where everyone could work on finishing off any previous projects they’d had problems with, and we’d do our best to help. This is the perfect activity to schedule in the calendar!

This semester, we’re working with the grade 5/6 group, and after one session I can already see some skills, with a few keen kids that know a bit of Python from previous years, and one that did a couple of lessons at home before this week! It’s exciting to see a few familiar faces from previous years, with a ton of enthusiasm with a manageable group size this year. Although it’s always great to have more students attending, it can get unweildy and this tends to reduce our ability to help everyone. The other problem is that there’s always those few computers that are not charged or not working.

As we have some students with no Python experience, and others with previous experience, today’s plan was to start those with no experience on the Code Club Python 1 projects, and for the more experienced we chose a password generation project from the UK Code Club page.