This fall, I started a Grades 2-5 coding
club at our school (which you can read about here). I'm sharing our
experiences in hopes of helping others wanting to start a coding club and also
to document this aspect of the Kids Who Code project.
In our first coding club meetings, students
worked in multi-age teams to complete Scratch Jr. challenges using activities
from their website. After the first couple of meetings, students were
able to work fairly independently in Scratch Jr, so I started working with
small groups to introduce other coding tools. Since I didn’t want to take
whole teams away from their Scratch Jr. challenges, I chose a grade to work
with each week while the other students continued with Scratch Jr. I
picked different tools to introduce to each grade so that, as a collective
club, we had experience with a variety of tools. For example, I introduced Lightbot
to our Grade 5 members and set up Kodable accounts for the Grade
2s. This system of “small group instruction” works well, since teaching
50 kids at a time seems a bit overwhelming to me.
There were a few little “housekeeping” tasks
that came up for us as a new coding club. If you're thinking of starting
a club, they are things to consider when you're planning!
Clean up – On the first day, I didn’t
even think about the fact that there isn’t a garbage can in the gym, so we had
to make a habit of bringing one in from my classroom. I also realized
that we needed to sweep the gym floor after our meetings since we were eating
our lunches in there, so I asked for student volunteers and was very pleased to
have more than enough students offer to help. (I actually turn down
students every week because so many of them volunteer to help – what a great
bunch of kids I work with!). So basically, whichever 3-4 kids volunteer
first stay for a few minutes after our meeting and I give them the brooms to
clean up – easy!
Attendance – I felt it was important
to have a record of which students were meeting with me each week, so I made a
simple “class list” of club members. Older students volunteer to check
off all members in attendance or I carry my clipboard with me as I circulate
during meetings and mark down attendance as I work with students.
Membership – I’m still working on
this one. Over 60 students signed up to try coding club. Most of
them attended our first few meetings to see what it was like. Now that we
have been running for several weeks, a few students have decided not to
attend. I’ve been doing lots of thinking about this… is it okay to “let”
them quit? Should their parents sign off on it since their parents signed
the form for them to participate? Is it important that students commit to
attending every meeting or is it okay for them to choose their usual lunchtime
routine and outdoor play after an initial trial period? I’m leaning
towards the latter – for several reasons. Coding club is an
extracurricular activity. Sure, we are learning a lot, but it’s meant to
be fun. I don’t want to force kids to attend. I also think
that it was great for students to sign up and “give it a try”. When I
sign up for a new exercise class or activity, I expect to have a choice about
whether or not I continue with it – and I think our students deserve that same
choice. That said, I may still create a simple note to go home so that
parents are aware that their child is no longer attending. In
future years, I would discuss this aspect with students and come to an
agreement about membership in our club.
On the whole, our coding club start-up has run very smoothly and I really enjoy working with the students each week. It's nice to reconnect with my former students and get to know some students I didn't teach. If you're thinking of starting a coding club, I'd certainly encourage you to give it a try!
