If you’re someone who is new to the community, welcome! Please note that there are some restrictions on new Code Club, CoderDojo, and Raspberry Jam registrations at this time
In this unprecedented time, you should follow the local public health advice in your country or region and take decisions on whether to cancel your club or event in consultation with the venue that hosts it.
If your club or event participants can’t currently meet in person, there are still lots of ways for you to support young people to continue learning. Here are three of the best options:
1. Host online club sessions
You can host online sessions with your club members using online video conferencing tools. This approach requires a bit more work, but it’s a great way to keep your club members learning together until you can next meet in person. We’ve created a detailed guide for hosting online club sessions for you.
There are lots of video conferencing tools to choose from, so we’ve set out some of the best options in the detailed guide linked above. It’s really important that you think carefully about the safeguarding implications of using online tools to interact with young people, and you need to make sure that you involve parents or guardians at every stage. The guide we’ve created also includes safeguarding information.
2. Send remote activities
This is a great approach for you if you cannot run live online sessions for your club and you want to keep young people engaged until you can meet in person again. We’ve created a detailed guide for sending remote activities for you. Here are the basics:
Set projects and challenges for the young people who would normally attend your club or event. Do this regularly, for example once a week or month, depending on how often your club sessions usually happen and on how much time you can give. Then the young people complete the project or challenge you’ve set in their own time, at any point before you set them the next one.
Share the link or a PDF of the set activities with parents by email. Make sure to include a range of activities for learners with different levels of experience and different interests. It’s a great idea to ask the young people to share links to their completed projects with you, for example links to their Scratch projects, websites, photos, or videos. You can then collate these into a remote show-and-tell that you share with the group when you set the next projects and challenges. You can also use Scratch teacher accounts for this.
3. Encourage self-directed home learning
If you can’t run an online or virtual club at this time, you can encourage young people to learn things they’re interested in at home. All of the Code Club and CoderDojo projects are available for free, in multiple languages, on our projects platform. Our Scratch, HTML/CSS, and Python projects can be completed online, without the need to install any new software. And there’s lots more for learners on the platform, including some fantastic ideas of what to build with a Raspberry Pi computer.
We are also running a weekly series of code-along videos and live streams called Digital Making at Home.
Share what’s working for you
All of these ideas have been inspired by amazing club organisers, volunteers, and educators who’ve tested different approaches to supporting young people to learn when their clubs can’t meet in person. We want to continue learning from you and sharing best practices with the whole community. Here are some ways in which you can tell us what’s working for you and your club or event:
- Join one of our upcoming community calls!
- Email us at support@codeclub.org, info@coderdojo.org, jam@raspberrypi.org
- Join us on the CoderDojo Slack channel — you don’t need to be involved in a CoderDojo to join
Project ideas
We are regularly sharing activities you can use to engage your learners:
- Digital Making at Home — our series of weekly, themed code-along videos and live streams