Introduction to Week 3

Resources

Introduction to Week 3

So far in the course, we’ve looked at the practical aspects of setting up your club and at ideas for the structure of your first session. In the final week, we’ll take a closer look at motivation and celebrating success.

Praise is really important for celebrating success. I find that giving specific praise works really well and helps to motivate learners. So rather than saying “Well done, everyone”, you could say “Well done, you’ve all worked really hard on debugging today”.

We’ll cover lots of other methods of encouragement this week too, such as giving certificates and holding show-and-tells. These can be used to reward learning from failure, problem-solving, and effort, as well as attainment.

At the end of the session, we usually have a drink and a biscuit and sit together. Generally, I select someone to either share their work or talk about difficulties or successes they had with their programming during the session. This is an opportunity for the club member to talk about how they solved a problem or to ask other coders if they have any suggestions that they could try. — Denise Philips, Code Club leader, Townhill Junior School, Southampton

There are lots of different ideas that you can try, and we’ve gathered some of these in case studies coming up this week. I hope this will help you to end the course with some inspiration on how you can establish a fun and creative atmosphere and make your club unique to you and your learners.