Code Club opens up its coding-for-kids projects for UK parents and teachers

Code Club wants to make its programming materials available to more children around the UK.

British after-school programming clubs network Code Club has started publishing its materials online, in an effort to make its coding lessons available to a wider range of children.

The organisation, whose network includes more than 2,100 volunteer-run clubs around the UK, has made its Scratch, web development and Python projects available online for the first time.

“We’ve done this to help more kids learn and create on a computer. Not everyone is lucky enough to have a Code Club yet, but many children do have access to a computer at home or in the classroom,” explained Code Club on its blog.

“The projects are aimed at 9 to 11 year olds, but there is no reason why younger children and grown ups can’t learn too.”

The projects, which are also available for people outside the UK, were developed over the last year by Code Club and its volunteers. “We’re hoping that now the projects are open for all, it will be more tempting to start new Code Clubs,” explained the blog post.

The news follows Code Club’s recent announcement of a training programme to teach computing skills to British primary school teachers, backed by £120,000 of funding from Google.

Its Code Club Pro initiative is launching ahead of the introduction of a revamped primary curriculum in September, which will include computer programming for the first time.

“The computational thinking strand of the new curriculum is the bit some teachers are less happy about: they don’t know it, and were never taught it,” co-founder Clare Sutcliffe told The Guardian at the time.

“That’s fair enough. If you were told suddenly that you had to teach somebody sailing, and had never sailed before, you’d be pretty scared too. But we think we’re in a good place to help those teachers out.”

Growing interest in early programming skills from parents and teachers is also behind the release of a number of tablet apps teaching coding to kids. The latest, Tynker, launched this week, joining Hopscotch, Hakitzu Elite, Kodable and others on the app stores.