The first week of coding courses this summer flew by. We welcomed students into age groups from age 7 through to 17 and it was brilliant to see the progress made.
Children joined us for either 3 or 5 days with the longer coding course including 2 days for the students to develop their own projects guided by codetoday's instructors. Everyone who joined us on introductory courses was guided through the basics of Python, moving on to develop their skills as the week unfolded.
Looking ahead to August we're excited to welcome a new cohort of students to both introductory and more advanced courses.
So what can you expect on a codetoday coding course?
With our younger students we start right from the very beginning, introducing the basics of how we “talk” to a computer using a proper coding language, Python. They also learn about one of the basic ways of ‘not repeating themselves’ when coding using a `for` loop. Here’s a flower that Ana, one of our students, coded in which a `for` loop is used to draw several petals on the flower.
We stick to a very gentle pace with 7 and 8 year olds. With older age groups we still start from the basics but cover a bit more. Our 9-11 year olds who attended Introductory courses last week explored repeating sections of code using loops a bit further, including getting the program to choose random positions on the screen for us to place stars in a night sky. Here’s a movie of the night scenes coded by a group of 9-11 year olds (with an unexpected addition towards the end…). We also introduce further key topics at this age group, including defining our own functions that perform specific actions in our program.
The older students went even further and completed a simple game. This enables us to introduce them to several of the key topics in programming, including planning and structuring code which is an essential skill as programs become more complex.
Our aim with every student regardless of their start point is to create self sufficient coders who can develop beyond the fundamentals and explore coding only limited by their imagination.
The next round of summer courses starts on the 19th August. We have a very limited number of places remaining across each age group so if you like to book for either 3 or 5 days click below to learn more.
