In 2006, just after their “Infinite Crisis” storyline, DC Comics skipped a whole storytime year in their comic book universe. In 2017 I volunteered to run a Code Club, one year on and it has had some very positive events. My initial code club volunteering took place in a school, introduced me to concepts like partner training and how important lesson plans are.
A few months later and an opportunity arose to volunteer at Mad Lab; running the weekend Code Club and handling the social media/communications for the club. At first it was a little daunting and different to running a club in a school, for starters young people have to make an effect to attend rather than already being on site. Secondary, the club actively needs advertising – I take an hour during the week to respond to emails, tweet (@CodeClubMadLab), and carry out the activities for the weekend’s lesson.
Working with MadLab has been brilliant; supportive people, great facilites and the regular mentions on marketing stuff. Even better though has been the ability to refresh my learning on HTML/CSS and Python, and the inspiration to continue coding. 12 months ago I wouldn’t have considered randomly creating a program to query NASA APIs or attempting to make an automated bingo caller. In a way encouraging others to code has encouraged me to code more.
I still haven’t seen any one code an infinite loop of Hello Worlds yet, but there is always time….
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