New Victims - Rivermead!

I started out with Code Club as an assistant to Peter Higginson, and as part of that joined the STEM Ambassador programme. This is a great initiative that gets people from the "real world" (whatever the f... that is!) to go into schools and work with children on Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths related projects - not sure where computers fit, oh, possibly Engineering? Anyway, they get you your DBS certification so that you can actually get into a school. Which is quite hard these days - Hawkedon for example has checkpoints on the front and inner doors, with releases controlled from reception etc.

Since the Hawkedon sessions finished at Easter, I wondered if there was anyone out there needing some help. The STEM network people in Winchester send out an email with requests, and Rivermead Primary was looking for someone to help with a "Scratch games challenge" for their Year 4 (8-9 year olds). The Challenge is for the kids, working in pairs with a kid from another school they haven't met before, to design and code a game in Scratch that will teach someone younger than them something. Efforts to be judged by a panel of head teachers, on the basis of a presentation given by the children. Interesting... Target date 30th June, it's already May, and we only get an hour a week, after school (3.30-4.30). Could be a challenge for everyone!

Another (virgin) STEM Ambassador, Graham, had also volunteered - has experience with Cubs and other things like that though, and was a school governor. I also roped in Peter, on the basis that even though I was leading it, he would provide great backup, especially as I'm on holiday some of the times that the club runs.

At the time of writing, we've run three sessions, which have been based on material for the first two lessons at Hawkedon. It's been hard - the kids are a lot younger than the Hawkedon guys, and it seems they haven't had the same exposure to Scratch, although they have had some. There are also logistical problems - we're using Scratch2 online, rather than Scratch1 installed, and once they have had to use tiny netbooks that struggle to run the browser-based IDE. Gosh. Still, everything we do is better than doing nothing, right? And they are starting to think about it more.

Code Club - the start

I went to Reading Geek Night - 2nd Tuesday of the month, upstairs at a large central pub. There I met Peter Higginson and got talking, ending up suggesting that I might be interested in assisting in running coding classes and an associated Code Club at a local primary school. Inevitably, his current assistant backed out, and I was called in.

Four weeks of Scratch lessons to two Year 6 classes (10 year olds), then Dec - April lunchtime Code Clubs, one hour once a week. It's fun. The kids are amazingly interested!

We started Code Club with some additional Scratch work, then moved onto the 8 micro:bits that the club has. They were quite fun, with kids getting involved in making music and various other things than can easily be done. It's quite hard to

1. Help all the people with questions, as they're all working at different speeds and levels, with only two people
2. Address/fix the problems they encounter when one has little or no experience of the tools yet, especially as some of the difficulties are because they deleted something!

Subsequently, we've moved onto Javascript, modifying a "shoot down the airliner" game. I'd forgotten lots about JS...

Ideally, I'd like to have some slightly longer term projects running, that involve multiple people doing various sub-tasks, that would carry us from week to week. But they are coming back, and enthusiastic, amazingly, so should I be asking for more at all?