Teaching children HTML

This week, I led my last Code Club session of this term with students from a local school in Islington.

Running a weekly code club was entirely new to me. I didn't know what to expect, what the children would be like, or what they would want to do. I had decided before I started that I wanted to impart real skills onto the students - something they could actually look back on and think "yes, I've learnt something new" - so I decided to focus on building websites.

I've had lots of experience building and maitaining websites, both through hand-coding and through Content Management Systems. In my first lesson, I built a simple comic-book strip using Trinket.io and then planned to ask the students to tweak the code to tell me about them.

And that they did.

I introduced them to tags which they were quickly using to add new paragraphs as well as using the style sheet to change the text colour and the background colours. Most impressively, they were adding their own images that they had downloaded from the web. Every single one of them lit up with delight when they saw the changes they made.

Over the weeks that followed, they learnt new skills and it was such a delight to see some of them adding a new image by code without any prompting. In the last lesson, they each built a robot using relative positioning to move images around the screen.

The best thing about my class was the number of girls. Although only a small group of seven in week one, all of them were girls. As the weeks progressed, the numbers changed with one or two boys joining but throughout I had the same core group of girls from years four to six, all eager to learn and to practice HTML.

I definitely had my challenges, most notably trying to deliver content across such a wide-range of ages (from eight to 11), and also thinking about what to teach them next. Some weeks, they took to it quickly, but in others they struggled. It's also tricky to deliver a weekly class at the end of the school-day alongside my day-job.

Nevertheless, it was fun, and a real joy to hear my class tell me they'd been practicing at home. To think that I'd introduced even one child to coding is such a fantastic feeling, and I hope they'll continue practicing in the new year and beyond.

#CodeClub #IslingtonSchools #HTML #CSS