This post follows on from a previous post about keeping coding interesting with multiple skill levels. In this post, I’ll be expanding on the idea by talking about putting together new activities to run at your Code Club or insert-you-coding-maker-startup-equivalent-here.
Types of activities Although not every activity needs to be step-by-step, the expectations need to be clear. In the example of designing a game, the pre-requisites must be clear so that it’s possible to complete the activity comfortably, with enough challenges to keep it interesting.
Guided learning verses multiple stream choices In our own Code Club, we’ve taken a few different approaches:
picking out individual interesting projects from the Code Club curriculum each week; following the curriculum in order; providing a variety of activities that provide students with skills ranging from various forms of visual coding to 3d design for 3d printing; and providing short-term workshops that apply coding skills, in areas such as robotics and web applications.
I threw together a slide deck a while back, for our Code Club, to go through some of the Scratch command blocks we used during 3rd semester. We used this at the start of one of our sessions, and got the kids to explain what commands did, and when they would use them. There’s a few at the end, that we hadn’t used, put in just to keep it interesting and stimulate a bit of learning.
