code club

Funologist Project: Use the Tinkering tools Scratch and Makey Makey

Use the Tinkering tools Scratch and Makey Makey to create engaging after school workshops

Scratch is a tried and tested tool for exploratory play and learning of coding ideas via tinkering. It’s genesis in MIT labs has ensured it is well supported with wide adoption and an interesting research base. Impressively, the community of users creating and sharing their creations or ‘scratches’ is significant in size and diversity. There are many remixes of all recognisable computer game types including adventure and narrative forms.

Makey Makey is a keyboard controller interface, which has had great success as a demonstration tool. It is often used in combination with Scratch to showcase the immediacy of new forms of creative software and interactive hardware controllers to create engaging activities.
We will be working with Code Club who are currently redeveloping their Scratch resource to increase the input and creativity of young people.

Continue reading →

EdLab Spark: Support and Improve Manchester’s Code Clubs

Code Club builds a community of volunteers who share their passion for digital making with children and teachers across the UK. We support our volunteers, who inspire the next generation by running weekly Code Clubs in their local area.

Our Challenge to MMU Students is to come and get involved with Code Club by helping at an after-school club and to help us measure the impact of our clubs.Working through the Code Club projects is a great way for children to gain an introduction to coding in a fun after-school environment. Can you find a way to measure how much impact your club has had in both sparking a love for digital making and gaining an understanding of basic coding concepts. Whilst we at Code Club like our reports full of data we LOVE creativity and involving the kids so find an exciting way to showcase your impact.

Support a Scratch Workshop

We provide creative resources aimed at children aged 9-11. Parents, teachers and volunteers use our projects to help children create games, animations and websites in weekly Code Clubs. We offer training for primary teachers delivered by volunteer computer science experts. Our aim is for all teachers to feel confident, excited and prepared to teach the Computing curriculum.

Exploring Opportunties at the EdLab Volunteering Fair

One of the key parts of the EdLab project is creating chances for interaction between students and local education projects. To increase the experience of different learning worlds our students have access to we invite local partners to Set Students A Challenge.

This Volunteering Fair was a quick way for groups and students to find out more about each other. They key for students to come up with appropriate responses to the challenges is for them to be able to find out in-depth information from the groups themselves about their needs and context.

Also the personal connection is great for firing enthusiasm and creating positive feedback loops! There were some very sparky students and representatives from groups there.

Login