Including parents and family learning

Including parents or guardians in the activities that your Code Club provides is a great way to showcase the brilliant skills that your club members are gaining as well as to encourage the wider community to get hands-on with digital making!

Lorna Gibson, Code Club Programme Manager and Code Club leader, explains how her Code Club members got their grown-ups involved in coding.

A few years ago, some of the older children at my Code Club told me they would like to run a session to teach their grown-ups how to code. There were several reasons why this idea was met with a huge amount of enthusiasm from all club members:

How much fun would it be to boss around the grown-ups?!
Many felt that their grown-ups should get more digital skills and that this could be a great first step.
And finally, (and the reason I found most interesting) the club members felt that the grown-ups would have a better appreciation of everything that they had achieved at the club if they tried a bit of coding themselves.

I’ve always been a fan of a child-led idea, so we started to plan a session for grown-ups, to be held towards the end of term.

Since we had been running sessions at the end of the Christmas and summer terms where the children had the opportunity to showcase what they had made and learnt to their families, we decided to change things up a little by turning the next scheduled showcase into a family coding session.

Lorna at her Code Club

The parents were invited, and on the day of the session, each child supported a parent, aunt, uncle, childminder, teacher, grandparent, or older sibling to complete an hour of coding.

The child then presented their family member with a certificate. They also gave feedback on where they could improve — including one boy who told his dad not to give up so easily, and "then you can be even more proud of yourself if you get it working after hitting adversity"!

The feedback from the grown-ups who attended was fantastic. They had fun, they learnt some new things, they resurrected some coding knowledge and experiences from their own youth, and they really enjoyed having a window into an activity that filled their child with such excitement.

Afterwards we heard lots of stories from both the children and the grown-ups about how they did some coding during the holidays, enjoyed learning together, and even found a renewed appreciation for how much work goes into the modern computer games that they were playing.

The event was such a success that we have made it a regular part of our Code Club, and we continue to hear stories about how coding has become a shared conversation between the children who attend our club and their families.