Episode: 1661
Title: HPR1661: OggCamp Interview with Paul Tansom
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1661/hpr1661.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 06:29:52

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It�s Monday 15th of December 2014, this is HPR Episode 1661.com interview with Paul Tansom,
and is part of the series interviews.
It is hosted by Coronaminal and is about 12 minutes long.
Feedback can be sent to Coronaminal at Coronaminal.org or by leaving a comment on this episode.
The summary is a short interview with Paul Tansom of Code Club.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by Ananasthost.com.
Get 15% discount on all shared hosting with the offer code HPR15.
That�s HPR15.
Better web hosting that�s honest and fair at Ananasthost.com.
Hello everyone.
This is Hacker Public Radio and my name is Philip Newbora.
In today�s episode of HPR you can listen to an interview I conducted with Paul Tansom.
Paul is a regional coordinator for Code Club, a nationwide network of volunteer led
after school coding clubs for children aged 9 to 11.
In the interview we discuss what�s involved in being a Code Club volunteer, how to get
involved, how Code Club and the UK national curriculum complement each other and Code Club
Pro.
The interview was recorded at Op Camp 14 held in Oxford in the UK on the weekend of October
4, 2014.
So I�ll camp and I�m speaking with Paul Tansom.
Alright Paul.
Oh.
So tell me, what are you doing here this weekend?
I�m here promoting Code Club looking for anybody who�s got a bit of spare time to run
off school coding clubs for kids, the next generation of odd 10 pretendies perhaps.
That sounds brilliant.
So what�s there�s Code Club involved?
You basically sign up on the website as a volunteer saying that you�ve got about an hour
a week for a term or more to go into a school and teach ages 9 to 11 years 5 to 6 to code.
So we�ve got project materials for doing scratch, HTML and CSS and Python and the kids
on the club seem to be loving it.
Oh, that sounds brilliant.
So can anybody volunteer to run one of these Code Clubs, can they?
Yes, yes, obviously we�re looking for a bit of background experience but we have got
mums running them in schools for kids and they�re learning ahead of the kids.
So I think the main thing is enthusiasm and the ability to follow the worksheets and
work out what�s going on.
But most people are technical.
Don�t do it.
Alright.
So I don�t know, thinking about it from my perspective, I would imagine it would be
quite daunting to go into a class full of kids and just sort of like teacher code club
is any help available?
Yes, we�ve just brought online regional coordinators throughout the country to help with
anything that volunteers need, help matching up schools to volunteers and finally volunteers
for schools that have been trouble finding one locally.
As far as actually going into the schools, we have�we�ve�can�t see this in radio
but we have project sheets which you can actually take a look at on the website if you like
which basically give the activities that you�ve got to support so if you go through the
project sheets and familiarize yourself with them beforehand then you�re ready for
most of the questions the kids ask.
They do come up with some wonderfully interesting ones sometimes and you�ll work with a teacher
in the class so they�ve got the classroom experience and you�ve got the technical
knowledge and beforehand you get a little bit of induction because we work with the STEM
ambassadors scheme who provide us with insurance and the DBS checks so that you�re all checked
out for being safe to work with the kids.
Alright, so you�re not just sort of like dumped in a classroom and you have a teacher
there who�s obviously familiar with the kids and you know which one is perhaps maybe
a little bit more encouragement or help or which ones are going to be high flyers and
an away and really challenging you to come up with something new.
Yeah, I�ve better to feel with those so it sounds like a really sort of like rewarding
thing to do.
It is, it�s great fun, I�ve been really blown away by it, I started back in 2012 on
the pilot teaching my son, he was in my first class, he�s now year 9 and he�s coming
back and helping me and he�s loving doing it as well.
Yeah, it is and something that we�re trying to do is engage with local businesses and
if they�ve got a corporate social responsibility department then people can team up from the
business and run it together and it�s, I find it sort of inspires you when you get back
to work you�re feeling really bored out by it and you think you know I�m ready to
go and if you work with a team from a business then if you�ve got a big project on and
you really got a concentrate on that because that�s your work you�ve got some people
behind you to just fill in the gap so that you�ll keep the code club going and smaller
businesses can come together and do it.
Yeah, sounds great.
So for listeners we�ve got in the UK, we�ve this year, we�ve UK schools that introduced
coding to the national curriculum, how does code club stack up to that, does it complement
each other or are schools now teaching something completely different and code clubs coming
along and you know teaching other things what�s going on?
No, we�re working very closely with the schools, the school that I work with is actually
using some of the code club materials in the class and I�m anticipating that as the
national curriculum kicks in and the kids come up we�re going to have to advance the
materials because they�re going to have a bigger background as they come up through
the schools.
We�ve also recently launched Code Club Pro which is volunteers going in and running
training for the teachers because primary school teachers not all of them feel that confidence
we�re teaching computing and we give them a bit of background information and give them
the sort of confidence that they need because surprisingly a lot of the stuff�we�re not
surprising to us but surprising to the teachers, a lot of stuff they�re doing, they already
do but they don�t completely know the jargon terminology that is written down in the curriculum
so you know things like an algorithm that they�re actually doing that sort of thing but
they�re not calling it an algorithm so you know the sequence of instructions or the
recipe or something like that if they think about it.
So we�re offering that now for schools that want to take this up on that.
Well I think you�re doing excellent work, it sounds like it�s going to be nice to
have a whole generation of kids that know what they�re doing.
It would be great, yeah I mean I�m back in the 80s when I was at school you know everybody
was at home computers and there seems to have been a dip, there�s a gap there there�s
you know the technical people seem to be getting older and there�s a sort of smaller
number of technical people in the younger age group because they haven�t been inspired
at school I don�t think the curriculum hasn�t led them naturally towards having a
go at programming and finding out whether it�s something they�ve been interested in.
Yeah totally I think when I was at school we had BBC microbes and what not and Commodore
16s and spectrums at home and computing was more about you know well if you wanted to
work at computer you literally had to you know program it but I think over the years
it�s one kind of the other way and computers have just been the consumer devices and
it�s nice to see the sort of like the Raspberry Pi stuff coming along and you know turning
the tables back and yeah it�s good stuff so yeah so a lot of my kids have got Raspberry
Pi�s at home so they�re going home and playing with this and the other thing is minecraft
I�ve noticed my son is really into minecraft and I suddenly thought wait a minute he�s
doing slash commands and he�s pretty much programming it by typing in commands to make
it rain or do something like that so if they get the opportunity and they�ve got something
that inspires them to do it they�re away.
Yeah totally so well brilliant thank you for talking to me today Paul.
You're welcome.
Yes anybody who�s interested go along to the website which is coclub.org.uk take a
look see what schools are in the area you can search there by post code and see what�s
there that�s looking or doesn�t know about it that you can evangelize co club too if
you�re interested.
Excellent.
Alright.
Thank you again.
Cheers.
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