Code Club

For the Swedish video game developer, see Code Club AB.

Code Club is a voluntary initiative, founded in 2012. The initiative aims to provide opportunities for children aged 9 to 13 to develop coding skills through free after-school clubs. As of November 2015, over 3,800 schools and other public venues established a Code Club, regularly attended by an estimated 44,000 young people across the UK.^[1] The organization also expanded internationally, and there are now over 13,000 Code Club operating worldwide.^[2] Volunteer programmers and software developers give their time to run Code Club sessions, passing on their programming skills and mentoring the young students.^[3][4] Children create their own computer games, animations and websites, learning how to use technology creatively.^[5]

Code Club

Founded	2012 (2012)
Founder	Clare Sutcliffe Linda Sandvik
Location	United Kingdom
Area served	United Kingdom
Website	codeclub.org.uk

It has Scratch, HTML & CSS, Python and a variety of other coding languages. The initiative also provide free BBC Micro:bits to children above the age of 9.

History

Code Club is the brain child of Clare Sutcliffe^[6] and Linda Sandvik,^[7][8]

we share a belief that it is essential that children are introduced to coding at an early age and shown how much fun it can be.^[9]

A viral video featuring Prince Andrew, Martha Lane Fox, Chad Hurley, Niklas Zennström, Brent Hoberman and Tim Berners-Lee was released to promote awareness of the project.^[10]

On 3 November 2015, it was announced that Code Club had become "a wholly owned subsidiary of the Raspberry Pi Foundation."^[11][12] On 16 March 2018, Clare Sutcliffe, then executive director at Raspberry Pi, announced leaving both Code Club and Raspberry Pi.

Technologies

The curriculum teaches children Scratch, HTML & CSS and Python. Students and teachers use the Trinket web browser application to write code.