At WA, a wide variety of extracurricular activities are offered, and one of them, taking place on a Monday after school, is Coding Club. I have attended this club since the beginning of the year and have found it to be welcoming, fun and interesting. Since I first walked in at the beginning of Term 1, it has been fantastic to see the club growing and more and more people joining. The club is run by Mr Vardoulakis, and includes things such as Scratch programming and creating 3D designs.

Some of the first things we did at this club were programming challenges in languages such as Python. Some of these we had to figure out on our own, but many followed tutorials from the Raspberry Pi Foundation. My favourite out of these was probably the ‘Turtle Race’ on Python- it was fun watching the turtles and predicting which one would finish first! Later on, we also did a ‘game jam’. This involved a theme being chosen randomly(‘Cars’ won) and then all of us making a game to follow that theme. My game was a Scratch project where you had to control a car in the city to avoid lightning.

More recently, we have had one term devoted to space-related projects. In the beginning, we were programming pixels to create pictures to send to space, which led to 3D design in a website called Tinkercad. Our project in Tinkercad had to be space-related, and although learning how to use the website was difficult, it was definitely worth it! I created a rocket with my name on it, a conclusion to what I had done on Tinkercad that term.

This term, we are making programs related to machine learning and AI. We are following a Raspberry Pi tutorial which will eventually lead to us creating a program on Scratch to recommend songs. In the beginning, we made a project on ‘Machine Learning For Kids’ to distinguish between apples and tomatoes. We fed the AI pictures of both apples and tomatoes until it knew which one was which. Now, we are starting the song recommendation project, which I am sure is going to be amazing!

Overall, taking part in Coding Club this year has been wonderful, with fun experiences and challenges along the way. I look forward to continuing the club for the remainder of the year, and hopefully next year as well. Whether you have an existing interest in programming or would just like to try something new, I would wholeheartedly recommend going to Coding Club!