Code Club counts down to space mission

Coding charity offers free resources to celebrate astronaut Tim Peake's ascent to the International Space Station

Posted by Rebecca Paddick | December 07, 2015 | Technology

Code Club, International Space Station, Tim Peake, Astro Pi, Raspberry Pi Foundation

Not-for-profit educational organisation Code Club has launched two weeks of space-themed celebrations as it counts down to the launch of the rockets which will be taking some fantastic AstroPi experiments, and British Astronaut Tim Peake, into the stratosphere and beyond to join the International Space Station (ISS).

Founded in 2012, Code Club aims to give every child the opportunity to learn to code. They work to do this through their network of volunteer-led after school clubs and teacher training sessions in the UK, and by providing project materials and a volunteering framework to support Code Clubs in 80 countries around the world. 

ABOVE: On 15th December, British Astronaut Tim Peake will make his own journey to the ISS

Last year, the Raspberry Pi Foundation ran the “AstroPi” competition, which gave children in the UK the chance to devise coding and computer science experiments for Tim Peake to run aboard the ISS. 

The competition winners were announced in July this year. Their experiments have now been launched to the ISS and put into action for a number of weeks.

On 15th December, British Astronaut Tim Peake will make his own journey to the ISS from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan aboard the Russian Soyuz spacecraft.

ABOVE: The new projects use the visual coding language, Scratch 

The club has now created a number of fun resources, including two space-themed coding projects, to get children excited about the launch.

The first project, which has just been released, enables children to create a Space Quiz to test their friends. They will learn how to use decisions to ask the player space trivia, using the answer they provide to tell them whether they’re correct. They’ll also use a variable to keep track of the player’s score.

To find out more, visit blog.codeclub.org.uk/2015