As you might already know, we dived into Python after a couple of small groups did pretty well towards the end of last year - when we played with a Raspberry Pi SenseHAT, some RGB LEDs, and developed a micro:bit-powered plant monitor. The plant monitor proudly sat in the school office for the rest of the year, and later evolved into a self-watering plant on Kid Inventor day. This year was spent making our way through Code Club’s Python modules 1 and 2, and more!
Lately a few of us having been running some workshops with Scratch and the Makey Makey. Once the grade 3 and 4 students had finished the Code Club Scratch 1 and 2 modules, and some additional projects, we moved them onto the Makey Makey workshop. The Makey Makey is a device that allows objects to be connected and used as switches, which the computer interprets as various keys on a keyboard or mouse.
Just Coding vs. Improving and Learning New Things The more years our school’s Code Club runs, the more I realise how well-designed the Code Club Australia curriculum is. I’ve previously mentioned that we started our Code Club just picking out what we thought would be most fun for the kids. Now I’ve realised that it’s probably time to stop apologising for teaching coding, and muster a degree of boldness and work hard to show kids what they can do with it.
