Code Club Australia

Code Club is a self-service model: all resources are available online, free. This enables a sustainable solution for our educator, volunteer and student community. Projects are translated into 28 languages. Projects are also available offline for communities that are not “connected.” Curriculum is scaled to beginner (Scratch), intermediate (HTML/CSS) and expert (Python and Sense Hat). Lessons are design-thinking oriented and aligned to national learning standards. Community contributed projects are available with over 2,000 extensions. Ideation, experimentation, and discovery are guided through our project based learning guides. Our impact is inclusive to girls, remote communities and children with disabilities

The Code Club framework, materials and community are free and openly accessible. Our lessons are designed with educators and volunteers to determine the best outcomes for young learners. Our community github model allows for the community contributed projects to be reviewed and considered for publication in our official bank of material based on community response. The community is largely volunteer driven and is shaped by the educators/volunteers that contribute their time.

Code Club Australia curriculum is available at a self-directed and independent pace. No background knowledge or training is necessary to be involved in a club. There are safeguard steps required, such as a working with children's check and registration, however these have demonstrated to have minimal impact in the onboarding process of volunteers and educators. The curriculum is easy to learn, follow and teach and aims to provide children with basic understanding of computational thinking, whilst covering the new national Digital Technologies curriculum. Code Club provides a platform, curriculum and support team to ensure that the content is available with an efficient, enjoyable and integrated purpose.

Extending beyond the Code Club World premise, CCA has developed an innovative and unique Teacher Training program. This professional development course allows two teachers from every school to train to bring the Digital Technologies curriculum to their school with no direct cost for training or the curriculum material. CCA encourages schools identified as serving low SES communities to apply, and priority is given to educators serving youth most in need. The face to face and online facilitation of learning is highly valuable, specifically to those teachers and educators separated by distance. In 2016, our staff travelled in a Caravan of Code to train teachers across NSW and QLD, travelling over 2750 kilometres.

Code Club has designed a business plan with sustainability as a core feature. The project and vision is long term allowing for the product to continue to adapt to any given environment regardless of funding. We aim to make Digital Literacy as common as learning to swim, to learn languages. We see this as a life skill. Code Club Australia aims to include reaching further in remote and regional outreach and developing funding and partnerships. Whilst these goals continue to expand, the fundamental aim to #getkidscoding remains as the core as it continues to grow independently.