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.
This semester, we swapped over to the second of our Code Club groups. Although this group has older students, there’s also some younger kids that missed out last semester, with a good spread of newcomers. Since each group has less time with our Code Club being split into two shorter semesters this year, and we have more students learning to code in the curriculum now, we decided to start with Code Club’s slightly more advanced Scratch2 module this time.
Code Club parents are great! While chatting to parents of previous Code Club students and those having had their last Code Club, it was interesting to hear what previous students were up to, what those leaving were looking towards, and glean some insight into ways we could improve. Although we’ve had a great year overall, it’s always good to get feedback and an end-of-year dinner was an opportunity to introduce parents to our other volunteers, and give credit for an exceptional effort this year, and really added so much to a larger code club.
