Family Time
by Editor

The Best Coding Clubs for London Kids

One of our passions here at the Depot, is to shout as loudly (and politely of course) about all issues relating to equality and removing stereotypes of boys and girls ambitions (and success) when it comes to just about anything. We love nothing more than seeing a girl sparing with her team mates in the Dojo, or boys baking a fluffy Victoria Sponge on Junior Masterchef.
We want our kids to feel that they have the ability be successful in any job they want and, if this means getting down and dirty replacing wheels on our bikes, perfecting our ‘slip one, stitch one’ technique or following in the footsteps of the remarkable list of women on R4’s Women’s Hour Power List, or making it to the TED Stage to share their secrets of success, then it’s a 10 out of 10 for effort for all of us.
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Next week (March 3-9) the campaign the UK Hour of Code is launched. The aim is to send the message out that every student and classroom can learn how fun coding is in just one hour. As it’s timely the year of code, a group of influential people are backing the campaign, (that has also been a huge hit in the US). Baroness Martha Lane Fox (Lastminute.com founder) speaking on behalf of the campaign says … “Hour of code is fantastic. Yes, The uk needs many more technical skills but more than that learning to code can help unleash the next generation of creativity.”

Talking of clever people, recently we have been inspired reading about Sophia George the V&A Museums first ever appointed ‘game designer in residence’. Sophia (22) is a big gamer who studied a Games Art and Design degree at the Norwich University of the Arts, and achieved a distinction in Games Development (MProf) at Abertay University.

She won a ‘BAFTA Ones to Watch’ Award in 2013 for her development (with 4 colleagues from her company Swallowtail Games) of the family friendly puzzle game Tick Tock Toys. In her 6-month residency role at the V&A she will be researching the history of British design shown in the Britain 1500-1900 galleries to create a game, as well as running public events. Read more about the public events and her residency here. We can’t wait to pop in and say hi!
So with this in mind, we wanted to share the first of our new finds in the world of coding for kids, (and video game design), with details about Codasign, a company that specialises in teaching about coding for all ages.
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Coding workshops for kids
Most kids absolutely love playing videos games so why not teach them to design and create their own? This Saturday Codasign is running kids coding workshops in which the outcome will be a platform game! For any children aspiring to make the next Mario or Sonic, this is the first step.

Codasign

Codasign believe that digital technologies have the same creative potential as paint and canvas. Their workshops enable people with great ideas to use computers to express themselves and bring these ideas to life. We welcome people who want to make a noise, create something beautiful, or just learn a new skill. Whether teaching children or adults, we love working with open source tools like Processing, Arduino, Scratch and MaKey MaKey.

Kids Workshops

In the Coding workshops, you will learn how to design and draw their own characters, how to think about game mechanics and most importantly, how to program in a visual environment called Scratch to create the whole thing. You will learn how to use Scratch to navigate a character around a level on a platform game to collect things. Scratch is a drag and drop programming environment that allows you to create your very own projects!

The workshop will start from the basics, teaching the kids how to design and draw backgrounds, a character and objects within the game. By the end of the workshop they will have one level completed, which they can carry on working on at home.

There are other workshops planned which will teach you to Create Your Own Night Light (see here), so keep the website bookmarked, and add your name to the mailing list to get yourself and your kids a fast track pass into becoming way more cool, interesting and remarkable than you already are.

Adults courses

They also host workshops for adults, and will be announcing the Spring programme soon. You see see current workshops here: http://codasign.com/upcoming-workshops/ and be added to the mailing list if you’d like to stay informed.
Private Tuition

Have a particular skill you’d like to learn or a project you’d like some help with? If you’d like to work with one of our instructors one-on-one, we offer private tuition for £30 an hour. Contact us at info@codasign.com.

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Codasign Workshop Location

The workshops are taking place in Finsbury Park at Furtherfield Commons, with a session for 6-9 year olds from 10am – 12pm and another for 9-12 year olds running from 1.30 to 4pm. For more details go to click here.

Contact : Codasign – Be Creative With Technology
http://www.codasign.com: info@codasign : Studio: +44(0)7514 777304

Join our mailing list: http://mailinglist.codasign.com

Other coding courses & Information

So far we have found the following, but we are new to this so please leave a comment if you know of more… we’d love to hear from you.

* Code Club : a nationwide network of free volunteer-led after-school coding clubs for children aged 9-11.

* Young Rewired State : We introduce these children to like-minded peers at events around the world where they use freely available open data to make websites, apps and algorithms to solve real world challenges

* Scratch : With Scratch, you can program your own interactive stories, games, and animations — and share your creations with others in the online community

* Hopscotch : Ipad coding for kids

* Crunchzilla : A code monster programme for kids

* Code Academy : Online website where you learn to code with online tutorials

* Girls who Code : A US based company campaigning to increase participation of girls in coding courses