We’ve been thrilled at the community response as the Code Clubs have grown. Every week I get emails from parents wanting to get their kids coding. And volunteers are stepping up to help mentor the clubs, making the whole operation possible (thanks volunteers!). There are a few questions I have heard a lot that, combined, can make a difference for… Read more →

Welcome fans, supporters, and the curious to Code Clubs of Arizona’s new home! The www.azcodeclub.org site and this blog will keep you up to date with our activities and statewide efforts to empower Arizona’s kids for the future economy. The boys and girls who participate in the Club at Downtown Mesa, East Mesa, Camelback, and elsewhere will also create pages… Read more →

While a lot of the kids these days prefer the graphical interface of Scratch, there have been sightings of javascript wizardry. We use Khan Academy, which provides a limited set of js methods and functions, and some nice features like automatically rendering whatever we put in the draw() function. But until recently, it was painful to draw any shapes that… Read more →

One unexpected side effect of raising money on Indiegogo is the addition of marketing to our “curriculum.” The first several months of the Mesa Code Club were spent honing our craft and making cool things. The intrinsic joy of creation is a powerful motivator, and we’ve had a lot of fun. But now that we are reaching out to the… Read more →

One of the most exciting aspects about innovation is the way ideas feed off each other. I love to see the output of human brains add together to something greater than any of the individual brains could have done. In the Mesa Code Club, we see it all the time. I think it’s great that tools like Scratch and Khan… Read more →

One of the Code Club members (6th grade) was using the draw function in Khan Academy to make a picture of a rainy day. She used ellipses to draw billowing clouds, and yellow triangles to make lightning. When she wanted to add the rain, she applied one of the most important computer programmer attributes – laziness – and ran into… Read more →

I’m sure there are lots of other people out there doing the same thing, but can we just take a minute to sing the praises of Jessica Liu, who created the javascript tutorials for Khan Academy’s computer science section. Jessica has done a lot for the 20-30 kids in our club who have worked through her tutorials: Taught in an… Read more →