This year’s Code Club teaching is nearly at an end – I cannot do next Friday and the Friday after that is the last of the school year, so it seems like a good time to reflect further on the way it has gone – though I am sure I will have some more thoughts later.
This week was a strange one – as only one of the children attended (the last two weeks were cancelled because of an INSET day and a school residential trip and I think some of the children thought it was already over while others wanted to just get out into the sunshine).
All this term I have thought the children were struggling with the work – HTML seems very different from Scratch (certainly the tagging paradigm feels very different from the children’s perspective) and the resources to put HTML pages up on the web just are not available in the school (one lesson from all this is that primary schools are still shockingly under-resourced for this sort of work – for all the talk of educating a digitally-aware generation nobody seems to have put the deep infrastructure of high bandwidth connections and servers in place).
But the lovely thing was that the child who had turned up plainly had got it and took great pleasure in reversing roles and testing me on whether I knew how to construct a basic web page.
Related articles
- Computer or maths books for kids – any recommendations? (cartesianproduct.wordpress.com)
- Code Club goes global as it celebrates first birthday (standard.co.uk)
cartesian product ... stuff about computing mostly 
One response to “Some more thoughts on @CodeClub”
If the kids lack reliable Internet access, I’m not sure what you can do. If the roadblock is lack of hosting, though, there are places you can host free pages (at least static HTML, which I imagine is all you need). Github is one; I know of a chap at Cardiff who hands instructional pages there.