Coding Club

By Simon Clarke | Posted: Wednesday December 7, 2016

Room 3 have been learning the basics of coding.  Check out the first of their games that they created which tells the story of their camp at Tirohanga

Hunter Hathaway and Taylor Baker created "The Awesome Camp Tirohanga!"

Lucia Luxton, Sylvie Irwin and Ruby Goodchild created a fanastic story to go with their game.

Annabelle Batchelor and Eva Sommerville created Tirohanga A&E

Check back next week to play more games as they get completed.

Starting in Term 1 2017 a Code Club is going to be run either before or after school. The School will have a number of Raspberry Pi micro computers available for kids to use and we will run through some introductory lessons (Coding Minecraft with Python most likely) before helping the kids explore what interests them. There are some excellent online resources ranging from 'Build your own web site in Python Flask' (That a year 6 boy completed last year) to the Code Club program which teaches kids programming using Scratch to build games and other projects. We will also get to play around with some electronics (build your own robot anyone?) as the Pi can be extended in all sorts of interesting ways.

The code club can only work with the help of the parent community, in particular the IT workers in that community! Having helped the Kaikorai Robocup team for the last two years I can honestly say that helping out the group will be a lot more fun and a lot less scary (10 kids in a small room with computers!) than you might think. You do not need to be a Python guru or a Raspberry Pi expert, just come in and help the kids work things out for themselves.

Please contact me (Chris Mein - [email protected]) or Simon Clarke if you can help. Turning up every morning would be great (I will see you there) but even helping once a month will allow the club to get started. We also need a list of 'emergency' helpers who can come at short notice if really needed.

I really hope that with your support we can start the code club and it can become a part of the wonderful opportunities available at Kaikorai.

Thanks

Chris Mein