In recent weeks I’ve been assisting my kids’ primary school to get a Code Club together. Code Club is a movement to establish coding / computing groups in at least 25% of primary schools across the country. It’s volunteer-led, and only a few months old. I’m very happy to support it.
In getting things set-up I spoke with teachers and governors, and even visited an existing Code Club in Stockport. Many thanks to @lizhannaford for hosting us – Liz has posted a great blog around their first term activities. Certainly , meeting others involved locally gave us more confidence to proceed. For this reason, we’ll be hosting a Code Club organisers (and potential organisers) meetup at MadLab on 13th Jan – all welcome.
So – we will be starting our Code Club in January… hooray
The Greater Manchester Code Club Challenge
I was also very interested in what the 25% target set by Code Club meant to the 2.5 million people in Greater Manchester. Hence, I grabbed the data on the number of schools from Edubase and did some simple calculations. Taking that further I spend a bit (OK, too much!) time on Piktochart to get this infographic together.
Please share!
Missing Targets
At the back of my mind something does nag. This week we saw several sporting bodies stripped of their funding for missing grassroots targets. With computing/maker skills, we don’t yet have the equivialent of a national body charged with this. I’m in two minds as to whether this should exclusively be associated with schools (especially in terms of the progress we’re making at MadLab). Nevertheless, the target set by CodeClub presents challenges – we are only 10% there (ie 2.5%!) locally – what happens if we miss it? In the long term view – how do we measure the impact we are having?
Less Yak, More Hack
In the meantime, these musings shouldn’t get in the way of us rising to, and shaping, the challenge. John at Mozilla mentioned this “mantra”, which does chime well. If we are serious about the digital skills our children need to suceeed, then this target is quite modest, surely? Indeed, this not only contains a target (25%) but a deadline (end of 2014).
Who’s in? How can you help? It’s time for us to act…
Hands up if you can help make it happen….