Coding clubs are changing after-school time

Most sessions are spent learning to debugdebugto find and fix the exact mistake in a piece of code that's causing an error rather than writing anything new from scratch, since real programming is mostly about fixing what's already broken.

One student is building a quiz game for her little brother's spelling homework; another is teaching a robot arm to sort marbles by colour using a camera and a chip the size of a stamp.

Club leaders say the shift away from fixed projects is deliberate: students who choose their own problem tend to stick with a stubborn bug for twenty minutes instead of giving up after two.

The club now has a waiting list at three schools, and older members are starting to run beginner sessions themselves on Friday afternoons.

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