Much has been said and written about the need to teach kids to code, but it's time to start doing something about it. Happily, a project called Code Club has been established for exactly that reason. "The idea is to create a nationwide network of after-school coding clubs," explains co-founder Clare Sutcliffe in an email to Wired.co.uk. "Each club is run by a volunteer who teaches from lesson plans devised by Code Club. We help the lovely volunteer approach their local school and pitch the idea to the headteacher.
They then run the club and teach for an hour after school each week."
The twin objectives of the project are to begin a code club in a quarter of the UK's primary schools by 2014, and to change children's attitudes towards programming -- making it cool and fun. "We were becoming frustrated at the fact that coding isn't taught to kids at a young age," said Sutcliffe. "We're taught physics at school because our world is ruled by the laws of physics. Now we are in a digital age it would be strange not to teach children how we program computers to create the applications and tools we use everyday."
The initial thrust will be around twelve-week courses based on the Scratch curriculum. The details of that are still in the works, and the Code Club website invites programmers to volunteer to help out if they reckon they can. If that sounds like a bit much, but you'd like to help teach a code club in your area, then that's very welcome too. More than 70 coders have signed up so far. "At age 10-11 (on average) children have the necessary numeracy, literacy and logic skills to learn the concepts of coding," said Sutcliffe. "Some might argue that they have these skills even earlier than that. To be blunt, ICT lessons today mainly consist of learning Microsoft Office. Are we raising a nation of secretaries?
I sincerely hope not. It's insulting to children to think they can't handle something more creative, inspiring and powerful than an Excel spreadsheet. "
Sutfcliffe is planning a hackday to put together projects for kids to work on after the initial 12-week starter term is over. "We'll take the best hacks and deconstruct them into lesson plans that Code Club volunteers can teach over 6 weeks. At the end of the project, the children will have a working hack project. In the future we'd love to be able to use hardware such as Arduino, Raspberry Pi and Lego Mindstorm, but for that we need funding either on a huge national scale or on a school by school basis."
Details of exactly when and where the hack day will take place aren't finalised yet, but you can sign up to receive more details on the Code Club site. "It's also about teaching children that they have the power to change the environment around them by designing the programmes they use for themselves," said Sutcliffe. "Long term we hope to inspire as many children as possible to learn to code, show educators the importance of programming and give tech community members a meaningful way of contributing to the education of future programmers."
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
