Morelands Code Club is all about having fun being creative with computers. It is educational, but it is more about inspiring the children to be explore for themselves than working with a lesson plan – it is an after school club after all. We have run since 2012, but unfortunatly we had a break last year (there was a lot going on at Morelands, and the computers weren’t together and the laptop batteries were tired after a hard days work!).

What sort of things do we do? Well Scratch is probably the main one. This is a programming language that allows you to create things by dragging coloured blocks around to tell the computer what you want to do. These are two games created by some past attendees:

Guide the cat through the maze avoiding the obsticles – completely from the imagination of Matthew who created it. You can try it out at: https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/16878140/

A three player game where two try to stop the third getting to safety – completely from the imagination of Charlie who created it. You can try it out at: https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/16877567/

Where we have been able to carry on into extra terms we have also explored HTML, to create web pages, and Python, where you can do more, but type in the commands. I have also brought in Raspberry Pi computers and netbooks with a robotic arm, and a matrix of coloured lights that can be controlled from Python.