Express & Star

One month of Code Club

As you may or may not be aware, computer science is now a part of the national curriculum.

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I've been very excited by this! Finally, kids of all ages are going to be shown how to use a PC to do more than just type up a document or send an email, they're going to start to understand how computers work and how to make computers work for them.

My day job is data manager for The Phoenix Collegiate, but coding is my passion. I'm lucky enough to work in a school whose ICT teachers are just as excited as I am by this challenging new curriculum, and even luckier that, they've allowed me to start my own after-school code club.

Every Tuesday after school myself, Adam (an ICT technician at the school who is also interested in coding) and about a dozen youngsters take over a room and enhance the video game Minecraft by writing our own code to control it on the Raspberry Pi.

I've worked with young coders before, mentoring at the YRS Festival of Code for the past two years, and helping out every month at Coding Brum at BBC Birmingham, but this is a little different.

Whereas most of the young people I have worked with in the past have already been coding for a while and just want a place to socialise with like minded people, while having a bit of fun coding as they do it, most of the youngsters who attend Phoenix Code Club (as we're imaginatively calling it) are almost completely new to coding, having only recently been introduced to it by their ICT/computer science teachers.

What's really exciting for me is witnessing the excitement of possibility and the joy they get out of suddenly realising they have this power over the machine; they're no longer passive users, they're creators.

We're only a few weeks in to our club, but we're already working our way swiftly through the excellent Adventures in Minecraft book. I can't overstate how useful this book has been to me; it's primary aim is to get kids coding using Minecraft as a platform to keep it fun at all times. It's given me a wealth of great ideas that the kids love. I'd recommend it as a great starting point for anyone looking to teach (or learn) Python coding in a much more interesting way than the usual Hello World programs many tutorials instruct you to write.

One of the first projects in the book, and the first that we've taught at our club, is making a 'Welcome Home' mat. Quite simply, our students have coded their copies of Minecraft to display a 'Welcome Home' message whenever they enter their base in the game. All this involved was a a handful of lines of code, but it lit the spark of imagination we wanted. Using those few lines of code as a basis, our students are now excited to start creating their own prompt driven stories, feeding bits of the story to the player as they progress through the Minecraft world.

They're starting to create their own games within a game, all because they realise now that they can.

Next week, I'll introduce them to some new code that will allow them to alter the Minecraft world's blocks directly from their own code.

Back in August, I ended a blog post by saying it's time for us to create a nation of digital creators and now I'm seeing this happen. I wonder what amazing things I'll see our students achieve over the next 12 months.

For more from Josh see his blog Geek Josh.

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