Keeping up the Momemntum Going through Python with everyone in our Code Club at once has been very rewarding. So far, the feedback has been that they feel they’ve been learning more than with Scratch - although some kids love Scratch, many found it a little limiting after round 6 months. As long as they progress with Python, most have been engaged and keen to be challenged - however, if they hit a wall and didn’t get help after a few tries, some would become frustrated or distracted.
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.
