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140 lines
9.2 KiB
Plaintext
140 lines
9.2 KiB
Plaintext
Episode: 1661
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Title: HPR1661: OggCamp Interview with Paul Tansom
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Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1661/hpr1661.mp3
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Transcribed: 2025-10-18 06:29:52
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---
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It�s Monday 15th of December 2014, this is HPR Episode 1661.com interview with Paul Tansom,
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and is part of the series interviews.
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It is hosted by Coronaminal and is about 12 minutes long.
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Feedback can be sent to Coronaminal at Coronaminal.org or by leaving a comment on this episode.
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The summary is a short interview with Paul Tansom of Code Club.
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This episode of HPR is brought to you by Ananasthost.com.
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Get 15% discount on all shared hosting with the offer code HPR15.
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That�s HPR15.
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Better web hosting that�s honest and fair at Ananasthost.com.
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Hello everyone.
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This is Hacker Public Radio and my name is Philip Newbora.
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In today�s episode of HPR you can listen to an interview I conducted with Paul Tansom.
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Paul is a regional coordinator for Code Club, a nationwide network of volunteer led
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after school coding clubs for children aged 9 to 11.
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In the interview we discuss what�s involved in being a Code Club volunteer, how to get
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involved, how Code Club and the UK national curriculum complement each other and Code Club
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Pro.
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The interview was recorded at Op Camp 14 held in Oxford in the UK on the weekend of October
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4, 2014.
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So I�ll camp and I�m speaking with Paul Tansom.
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Alright Paul.
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Oh.
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So tell me, what are you doing here this weekend?
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I�m here promoting Code Club looking for anybody who�s got a bit of spare time to run
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off school coding clubs for kids, the next generation of odd 10 pretendies perhaps.
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That sounds brilliant.
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So what�s there�s Code Club involved?
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You basically sign up on the website as a volunteer saying that you�ve got about an hour
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a week for a term or more to go into a school and teach ages 9 to 11 years 5 to 6 to code.
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So we�ve got project materials for doing scratch, HTML and CSS and Python and the kids
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on the club seem to be loving it.
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Oh, that sounds brilliant.
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So can anybody volunteer to run one of these Code Clubs, can they?
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Yes, yes, obviously we�re looking for a bit of background experience but we have got
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mums running them in schools for kids and they�re learning ahead of the kids.
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So I think the main thing is enthusiasm and the ability to follow the worksheets and
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work out what�s going on.
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But most people are technical.
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Don�t do it.
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Alright.
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So I don�t know, thinking about it from my perspective, I would imagine it would be
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quite daunting to go into a class full of kids and just sort of like teacher code club
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is any help available?
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Yes, we�ve just brought online regional coordinators throughout the country to help with
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anything that volunteers need, help matching up schools to volunteers and finally volunteers
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for schools that have been trouble finding one locally.
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As far as actually going into the schools, we have�we�ve�can�t see this in radio
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but we have project sheets which you can actually take a look at on the website if you like
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which basically give the activities that you�ve got to support so if you go through the
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project sheets and familiarize yourself with them beforehand then you�re ready for
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most of the questions the kids ask.
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They do come up with some wonderfully interesting ones sometimes and you�ll work with a teacher
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in the class so they�ve got the classroom experience and you�ve got the technical
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knowledge and beforehand you get a little bit of induction because we work with the STEM
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ambassadors scheme who provide us with insurance and the DBS checks so that you�re all checked
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out for being safe to work with the kids.
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Alright, so you�re not just sort of like dumped in a classroom and you have a teacher
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there who�s obviously familiar with the kids and you know which one is perhaps maybe
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a little bit more encouragement or help or which ones are going to be high flyers and
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an away and really challenging you to come up with something new.
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Yeah, I�ve better to feel with those so it sounds like a really sort of like rewarding
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thing to do.
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It is, it�s great fun, I�ve been really blown away by it, I started back in 2012 on
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the pilot teaching my son, he was in my first class, he�s now year 9 and he�s coming
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back and helping me and he�s loving doing it as well.
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Yeah, it is and something that we�re trying to do is engage with local businesses and
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if they�ve got a corporate social responsibility department then people can team up from the
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business and run it together and it�s, I find it sort of inspires you when you get back
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to work you�re feeling really bored out by it and you think you know I�m ready to
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go and if you work with a team from a business then if you�ve got a big project on and
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you really got a concentrate on that because that�s your work you�ve got some people
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behind you to just fill in the gap so that you�ll keep the code club going and smaller
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businesses can come together and do it.
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Yeah, sounds great.
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So for listeners we�ve got in the UK, we�ve this year, we�ve UK schools that introduced
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coding to the national curriculum, how does code club stack up to that, does it complement
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each other or are schools now teaching something completely different and code clubs coming
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along and you know teaching other things what�s going on?
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No, we�re working very closely with the schools, the school that I work with is actually
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using some of the code club materials in the class and I�m anticipating that as the
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national curriculum kicks in and the kids come up we�re going to have to advance the
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materials because they�re going to have a bigger background as they come up through
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the schools.
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We�ve also recently launched Code Club Pro which is volunteers going in and running
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training for the teachers because primary school teachers not all of them feel that confidence
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we�re teaching computing and we give them a bit of background information and give them
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the sort of confidence that they need because surprisingly a lot of the stuff�we�re not
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surprising to us but surprising to the teachers, a lot of stuff they�re doing, they already
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do but they don�t completely know the jargon terminology that is written down in the curriculum
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so you know things like an algorithm that they�re actually doing that sort of thing but
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they�re not calling it an algorithm so you know the sequence of instructions or the
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recipe or something like that if they think about it.
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So we�re offering that now for schools that want to take this up on that.
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Well I think you�re doing excellent work, it sounds like it�s going to be nice to
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have a whole generation of kids that know what they�re doing.
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It would be great, yeah I mean I�m back in the 80s when I was at school you know everybody
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was at home computers and there seems to have been a dip, there�s a gap there there�s
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you know the technical people seem to be getting older and there�s a sort of smaller
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number of technical people in the younger age group because they haven�t been inspired
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at school I don�t think the curriculum hasn�t led them naturally towards having a
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go at programming and finding out whether it�s something they�ve been interested in.
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Yeah totally I think when I was at school we had BBC microbes and what not and Commodore
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16s and spectrums at home and computing was more about you know well if you wanted to
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work at computer you literally had to you know program it but I think over the years
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it�s one kind of the other way and computers have just been the consumer devices and
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it�s nice to see the sort of like the Raspberry Pi stuff coming along and you know turning
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the tables back and yeah it�s good stuff so yeah so a lot of my kids have got Raspberry
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Pi�s at home so they�re going home and playing with this and the other thing is minecraft
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I�ve noticed my son is really into minecraft and I suddenly thought wait a minute he�s
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doing slash commands and he�s pretty much programming it by typing in commands to make
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it rain or do something like that so if they get the opportunity and they�ve got something
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that inspires them to do it they�re away.
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Yeah totally so well brilliant thank you for talking to me today Paul.
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You're welcome.
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Yes anybody who�s interested go along to the website which is coclub.org.uk take a
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look see what schools are in the area you can search there by post code and see what�s
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there that�s looking or doesn�t know about it that you can evangelize co club too if
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you�re interested.
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Excellent.
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Alright.
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Thank you again.
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Cheers.
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You�ve been listening to Hacker Public Radio at Hacker Public Radio dot org.
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