During our Code Club sessions, a lot of questions come up. It reminds me of when I was at school and trying to figure out how all these pieces of information fitted together. A good analogy might be piano lessons: school kids can often find themselves learning piano and doing exams, without anyone ever stopping to ask them what they wanted to get out of it or how anything they learned would help them achieve anything useful.
Python built-in functions and modules At Code Club our first Python scripts usually involve using built-in commands, otherwise known as functions e.g. print(), input(), int(). A list of built-in functions for Python 3 is available here.
Sooner or later we might want to do something a little more interesting, like generate some random-ish numbers, or process some information in file, or connect to another computer. In some of the Python tutorials we’ve done, you’ll notice the import statement being used to import more functions from the the Python standard library.
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:
