Copyright of Code Club UK

*This was a post I created in my old blog last year*

Last week we went back to Code Club at Glebelands Primary School. We unfortunately did not manage to go the week before, so when we arrived we learned that many of the pupils had progressed to the next stage of coding. Previously they had made games about the main characters of Code club and produced their own fireworks displays, this time they were attempting to create their own fruit machine game. Each of these areas are a different level in Code Club thus teaching the children the basics while steadily increasing the challenge level and this time it was certainly challenging. This increasing aspect of the activity continuously engages the pupils as they want to solve the challenge. Over the last few weeks we have been learning about self-esteem in children, we looked at the different aspects of high and low self-esteem and the effects it has on pupils. Within this class I feel that the pupils have a healthy level of self-esteem this is because they are focused on their growth and improvement of coding and happy enough to make a mistake, I feel this is because of the way Code Club is set out and how it teaches children to know that mistakes are ok and how to rectify them.

The children were quite happy getting on with this activity at the beginning until they came to stage 3!! This stage wanted them to stop and start the ‘sprites’ (a technical word for characters) when you clicked on them. Code club has a set of instruction that the children follow therefore, normally when they are stuck, the pupil or you just go back through the instruction in case they have missed anything. Thus teaching children to problem solve and improving their literacy skills by following the instructions carefully. However this time this method did not work. I sat with one pupil for whole the hour trying to figure out what was wrong and as the rest of the class arrived at the same stage we were all stuck by the end of the activity. We stayed behind after the kids had left to try and figure out this problem. This helped develop my teaching experience for when a lesson plan or activity does not go the way I had planned and so have a back up option available. Unluckily we were unable to fix this problem on this particular day, however when my fellow students returned the next week they managed to fix this by locating the action code required which we could not find before. Such a simple fix for a very big problem! However we have now hit another wall – challenge 7!

Unfortunately we will have to tackle this one after the Christmas holidays.