There is a new Best Evidence in Brief and this study will be of interest to many…

The National Foundation for Education Research (NFER) in the UK has published the results of a randomized controlled trial and process evaluation of Code Clubs – a UK network of after-school clubs where children aged 9-11 learn to program by making games, animations, websites, and applications. Code Club UK produces material and projects that support the teaching of Scratch, HTML/CSS, and Python. The clubs, which are supported by volunteers, usually run for one hour a week after school during term time.

The evaluation, conducted by Suzanne Straw and colleagues, assessed the impact of Code Clubs on Year 5 (4th grade in the U.S.) students’ computational thinking, programming skills, and attitudes toward computers and coding. Twenty-one schools in the UK took part in the trial which used a student-randomized design to compare student outcomes in the intervention and control groups. Intervention group students attended Code Club during the 2015/16 academic year, while control group students continued as they would do normally.

The results of the evaluation showed that attending Code Club for a year did not impact students’ computational thinking any more than might have occurred anyway, but did significantly improve their coding skills in Scratch, HTML/CSS, and Python. This was true even when control children learned Scratch as part of the computing curriculum in school. Code Club students reported increased usage of all three programming languages – and of computers more generally. However, the evaluation data suggests that attending Code Club for a year does not affect how students view their abilities in a range of transferable skills, such as following instructions, problem solving, learning about new things, and working with others.