Code Club Aotearoa helps teachers and kaiako across the country to develop their Digital Technologies skills and build the confidence to teach the DT curriculum. We aim to introduce educators to programming fundamentals and inspire them to lead fun and engaging code clubs within their schools.
Digital Technologies and Hangarau Matihiko is about helping students see their potential as creators of technology, not just users. Our resources and training materials have been designed to familiarise teachers with the basic concepts of programming which they can pass on to students in the classroom or at a school code club.
Hosting a Code Club in your classroom or at your school is a fun, engaging way to teach and learn alongside your students. With your help, ākonga learn how to make games, websites, quizzes and many other exciting things! Our projects have been written for children who are 7-13 years old, based on average literacy and numeracy levels for this age group. However, this is just an indicator, plenty of our Code Club students are outside this age group.
You don’t need to be an experienced programmer to run a club. Using our step-by-step project guides for Scratch, Python and HTML/CSS is a great way to build confidence for both you and your students.
You can choose to run the club by yourself or if you’d like some help, you can advertise for volunteers in your local area and reach out to us about our nationwide network of keen volunteers- we can put you in touch!
A club host must be able to provide adequate space, reliable wifi and devices for a club to meet once per week for at least an hour. Some children will be able to bring their own device from home, however we recommend children work on similar devices in the beginning to avoid too many technical difficulties! These are usually laptops, chrome books or desktop computers.
Club hosts are often quite involved with student and if required, volunteer recruitment when getting started. After the club has been set up the host may choose to teach on their own, help alongside volunteers or not teach at all, relying on the volunteers to do this part. No club is the same and it is up to the host to decide how they would like to run sessions.
As for projects, most clubs work through the Scratch modules before moving into Python and HTML/CSS. Some are entirely robotics based and many work with compact hardware like the micro:bit and Raspberry Pi. Again, it’s up to you as the leader and whether or not you have access to equipment, but there’s plenty of open source material out there to work with!
