Code Club: Week 1 - Technical Disaster

As part of my role as eLearning Leader (though, to be perfectly honest, I would do this regardless of roles or responsibilities) I have attempted to start a Code Club at school this past week. I sent out a form to get students to enrol and got about 60 students who were interested! With such a huge number I decided to split them into two days.

This has been a thing I've wanted to start for a while, but until recently I have not been sure how to go about it. Then, with the help of a presentation at the GAFE summit, I was introduced to cs-first.com, a google resource. I had heard of this before but never really gave it a chance (so many other things going on, and Code.org was pretty awesome for me at the time - still is, in fact). So when we tried a sample lesson a few weeks ago, I was blown away by how simple it was to a) run the club and b) learn new concepts. Google has really done a great job at preparing these coding sessions.

So I went through the process of setting up two clubs, sorting out the children (which still, will need to be changed) and getting everything ready. When we initially checked that the site was working, we did get most of the videos to play. I assumed (does this phrase ever end good?) that that meant that all the videos would work. The morning of the club, I was checking out the day's plan and couldn't get the needed videos to play. We tried on other computers in the class. No dice. So frantically, I emailed our tech support. They looked into it. They fixed something. No change. They fixed something else. Still no change.

The one bonus was though, that most of the children came late on the day. I had 7 students. I was able to help them through a part of the lessons to work on their code. But the next day, things still weren't working, so the second session was postponed.

It took almost a week, but the tech guys figured out the problem (by that time, I was interested in what it was, I was just super relieved that it was fixed. So code club will be on next week. Which is good, because the small group I had helped me get a trial run of what it's supposed to look like. We'll still be crunched for time, but that's better than nothing, I think.

I guess the moral of this story is: When you assume....