Happy new year! As we kick off the new year full of energy and ideas, Maria Quevedo, Director of Code Club, tells us what the Code Club team has planned for the year ahead.

2017 was a great year for Code Club

We welcomed almost 2000 new clubs to our community. A massive thank you to all of you who made this possible — there would be no Code Clubs without our dedicated community that shares our mission to inspire the next generation to get excited about computing and digital making.

We also expanded our programme to include 12- and 13-year-olds, with 350 secondary schools coming on board as a result. As part of the expansion, we added six new advanced Scratch projects to our range of resources.

We also launched our free online training course about how to run a Code Club on the FutureLearn platform.

We had an amazing 2611 people from all across the world sign up for the first course run — from the UK to Mexico, and from the USA to Mongolia!

Our ambitions for 2018

We will continue to increase our visibility in the secondary school sector to make even more schools aware that we now have projects aimed at older coders in Key Stage 3 and S1.

Our Regional Coordinators will continue to be at hand to support our community and run meetups and training sessions. We will expand this support into the Republic of Ireland, and will be recruiting a new Regional Coordinator to grow the Code Club community there.

We’re going to improve our website so that it’s much simpler for potential venue hosts and volunteers to get involved and to tell us about their availability. Knowing what’s happening in your club and what your plans are helps us enormously to provide better support for you, so we will be looking at ways to make it easier for you to talk to us.

Finally, we will be running more competitions and giveaways exclusively for active clubs, so make sure your club is set to active on your profile, and check your inbox regularly for announcements.

I very much enjoyed looking at the amazing projects you sent us for the festive competition — personally, I can’t wait to see more work by our talented club members!

Here’s to another awesome year of code!