Created: April 2012
Based: London
Website: www.codeclub.org.uk
Twitter: @CodeClub
Categories: Education, Science and Technology

Code Club is a free national after-school programme teaching computer programing skills to school kids through the creation of games, animations and websites.

Code Club set up its first pilot in April 2012, working with around 20 clubs to develop and test its teaching materials. It launched formally in September 2012 with 120 clubs. Two years in, over 2,500 Code Clubs had been set up, with an average of 15 young people per club. Over half of the clubs were established in the six months prior to April 2014.

It was founded by Linda Sandvik and Clare Sutcliffe after noticing a gap in pupils’ computer knowledge, the lack of skilled computer teachers, and the boring, outdated national curriculum for computer classes. Linda and Clare love researching, experimenting, testing, and prototyping. Children learn how to code computer games, animations and websites and each new Code Club project is user-tested and evaluated by kids.

Code Club operates using a non-profit, volunteer-led model. Volunteers with programming expertise set up and run clubs in primary schools and other venues, such as libraries.

The organisation plays a facilitating role, providing everything volunteers need to set up clubs: connecting them with venues, providing teaching materials and making sure that they have DBS (formerly CRB) certificates.

Code Club’s growth plan is ambitious: it aims to establish 5,000 clubs by the end of 2015, and ultimately, to reach all 21,000 primary schools in the UK and 100 communities internationally by 2018.