[hmlwilliams]

Thank you for posting this, I also volunteer in a local school running a Code Club. I would be very much interested to know how you handle differences in age group. I sometimes struggle as the group ranges in age from 4/5 yo to 11 yo. Finding suitable material that can be approachable for all is nigh on impossible and being only one individual I do not have the capacity to have multiple courses running in the same hour.

[edtechdev]

The main challenge is students who can't read yet vs. those who can. In an after-school elementary school coding club I did a while back, I mainly used https://code.org/

If Scratch is too advanced for the youngest of kids, try ScratchJr: http://www.scratchjr.org/

The kids also really liked Lightbot. Unfortunately, the web version uses Flash which means it won't run nowadays on most computers. There are apps though, including a LightBotJr version for 4+.

Here's a google doc with several other elementary school coding & robotics resources, although I haven't updated it in a while: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1r1b2CM1uTdST47IbWa7zlZYm...

[stojano]

Hi

The first time I had this course, the kids were between 8 and 10. The differences in cognitive behaviour were minimal. Just some of them were a little bit slower than the others, but at the end they helped each other and everyone was finished at time. I see, 4/5yrs would be much trickier.

For our next course it will be a little bit more "diverse". The oldest application is 14, and some of the former kids are coming again. So it will be the whole spectrum 8-14. I will see in the first lessons how I can separate them or offer different materials.

This time I'll offer some intro to Python. Maybe, one or the other will then grab this path.

I admit preparation of the materials was quit time consuming... more as I thought in the beginning it would be. But for the second course, I have already a bunch of prepared stuff.

[a-saleh]

Wow that is a giant difference, especially in cognitive capacity. I.e. by 11 you should be able to understand more or less anything (i.e. including abstraction, recursion, e.t.c) ... but a 5 yo might just be comprehending the number-symbol/object-count correspondence.

you could try to approach with a single theme? I.e. I heard from talk by Felienne Hermans, that her code club used alot of sprites/images from the Donald Duck comics, as everybody was reading that, and then you could scale by ability?

I.e. younger kids could do just animations, older kids interactions?