The Coding Club is back – bigger and better!  ! 

As part of the Tech Committee’s goal to support digitizing the children at Montroyal, we are planning to build on the success of last term’s club. It will continue to be led by Shaun Tinline, and focused on exploring coding and general computing skills with club members.  This term there will be two sessions, one for Grade 1 & 2 and one for Grade 3 – 7, we learnt last school year that these groups have distinct needs and will thrive in their own dedicated club space.

The Aim

Guide the children to learn with computers – stretching their minds and collaboration skills as they work together on coding tasks to build their skill.

When and where

Grade 3-7  Tuesday @ 7.45am – until the first bell (FULL)
Grade 1&2 Thursday @ 7.45am – until the first bell
​Both will be held:
In the computing lab

The details

  • ​Coding Club will remain free for signed up members for Term 1
  • Sessions will be fun, interactive and age appropriate, e.g. a 6 year old won’t be asked to master Python
  • Shaun will be using tried and tester approaches/projects and tasks, what he wants to build is an approach that will work for our kids and in the future
  • Children will be accepted on a first come, first served basis, and there will be a wait-list if over subscribed
  • Given that this is a club and in keeping with Montroyal school values.  We have a clear code of conduct for every child:
    • Listen to the leader
    • Be positive and curious 
    • Work with other club members
  • If a child can’t stick with the code, after 3 warnings, the leaders will discuss whether they should be in the club with their parents

​Contact the club Committee

Please email [email protected] if you have any questions

Want to get involved?

What happens next?

  • Registered club members will be contacted by 16th September
  • First club sessions will be on Tuesday 17th and Thursday 19th September and will run weekly, unless otherwise communicated until the end of term
  • Registration will remain open until places are filled

FAQs

There’s a wide range of ages and potentially skills, how will this work smoothly?
  • It’s a club vs a class and we are exploring whether this format can accommodate the wide range, we believe it will
 
Can you accommodate more kids?
  • If the first few weeks suggest we can, then we may open it up. Right now it is what we feel is manageable for the 2 leaders
 
Have you considered how they will manage the variability in skills, attention span, etc 
  • Yes, we have tried, through experience, research and taking advice from the school.  That said , no doubt there are things we haven’t thought of. We are facilitating a club environment, versus a curriculum and that premise should allow a great deal of flexibility
 
How will you manage if too many people sign up?
  • If we see a huge response versus what we are capping the group size to be, we will investigate how to address the ‘need vs supply’
 
Is it possible to have one group for 5 weeks and another group for the last 5 weeks?  Previous coding classes accommodated 20 students and had a waitlist. 
  • Our aim in the medium term is to deliver this kind of opportunity opportunity throughout a school year, to a wider audiance. So we are trying to deeply understand the responses to our ideas, which is likely to be more meaningful over a whole terms with broadly the same cohort of children
 
How do you select the club members? Is not based on some unknown selection criteria?
  • It is first come, first serve. With a waitlist if there’s over subscription, and if there are drop outs during the term we will fill the places. We want to make this a fun, collaborative and curiosity generating environment, where we can discover and understand to build a program for the school and a wider audience.  We will have a clear code of conduct for all children and consistent disruptors in the environment will relinquish that “person slot” for the next on the waitlist. Everything practical will be done to accommodate all children who have a sincere interest to participate, while supporting a conducive environment for other children to participate  
 
Is it possible to know what will be covered?  What coding language?  
  • The audience is elementary school children and the goal is to create fundamental understanding and foster curiosity. We will mention a few “languages” in my response, please treat them as illustrative versus comprehensive.
  • The delivery is self-paced, project-based. The initial sessions will be about gauging a sense of computing awareness and thinking, determining who within the group have done what
    • For the beginners, Scratch is the likely “language” and IDE that will be used in the first few sessions
    • For those a little older and familiar, and have an awareness of a language, we’ll accommodate the language of their choice. This assumes hardware can handle their choices. We know some children have been shown (read “briefly taught”) Python
    • We will guide children through exercises & projects that increase their understanding of computational logics, exposing them to transposing those thinking patterns in terms of semantics demanded by scripting and programming languages (js, ps, html, C#, java) versus focusing on delivering on a single specific language. The tendency is to lean towards the more mainstream scripting and programming languages, including those such as Scratch, which are used for teaching concepts to beginners
  • Let us also add that as a club setting, we have the ability to accommodate young designers and artists who will use technology to draw, paint and create. This is a facet that is oftentimes overlooked, when in reality are needed to be delivered alongside the algorithms generated by “coders”
  • We are looking to contribute to the weekly newsletter/email and/or website on what was covered, and what programs or events are available for children to take what they discover during the club session to a more dedicated and curriculum based environments