Club to get kids into code

Albany Village Library is the place for digital natives into tech.

Curious young technologists have a chance to work on their skills every week - for free.

For more than two years,

Albany Library have been offering space to a group of kid coders and volunteer tutors to learn how to make games and do basic website programming.

The club is part of non-profit organisation Code Club Aotearoa, a platform which links volunteers, resources, and venues.

Albany Village Library children’s librarian Lana Gaevski says she was alerted to Code Club through other children’s librarians and then went onto the website, registered Albany library as a venue and asked for volunteers.

The programme is designed by Code Club Aotearoa and starts kids off on a platform called Scratch, where they learn to programme basic games.

Once they’re done with that, then they move onto learning basic website creation and programming in Javascript.

Participants need to bring their own laptops, preferably those capable of supporting Google Chrome.

Volunteer tutor Geoff Black, who has been teaching the club for around 18 months, says it’s useful for kids to be able to ‘‘see under the hood’’ of a computing.

‘‘Even if the kind of things they’re learning aren’t specifically useful to career development, at least they’re sort of seeing that they can interact with a computer in a more sophisticated way than just pushing buttons on an app or something like that.’’

To participate in the Albany Village library coding club, phone the library on 09 486 8460. Numbers limited. Recommended for ages 9-12 years.