Coding across the Curriculum
The Growing Australia’s Digital Workforce report was released in June 2023 by the Future Skills Organisation. It was reported that all workers are expected to be digitally enabled, at a minimum, and that there was an expected 48% increase in the workforce for people who are digital experts, over the next 5 years.
Our schools are the starting point to building this knowledge and skillset, and our Code Clubs provide the perfect place for young people across Australia to pursue this as an area of interest, and a source of fun. There are many opportunities for coding to be used across all areas of the curriculum, to build contextual knowledge, demonstrate their learning, and to approach subjects in a completely new way!
Here are some projects that you can code for future scientists, musicians, artists, designers, mathematicians, athletes, anybody!
English
Ada’s Poetry Generator is a fun way to practice verbs, adverbs, nouns, and adjectives. Once this coding template is made it is easy to change the project to incorporate other types of words. It also leads to great discussions about language and can be adapted to become a Mad Libs game.
Mathematics
We have a range of projects that help young people practice maths skills by coding a game. You can try
Next Customer Please — addition and money
Brain Game — number facts
Scratch in itself is a great learning tool for maths. The Scratch backdrop is based on a cartesian plane, with the position of sprites controlled using the x and y coordinates. You can select this as a background to create contextual learning of coordinates while having fun coding.
Geography
Help young people learn about Australia and its famous landmarks with a range of projects from our Code of Origin series. Take a road trip across Western Australia or Victoria. Play hide and seek across Queensland and New South Wales. Play a shadow game about famous places in South Australia and the Australian Capital Territory. Or take a quick quiz about Tasmania or the Northern Territory.
Science
Whether your science focus is on space or agriculture we have a range of projects in these categories. Our space projects contain over 15 projects developed for Moonhack and also feature projects about the ISS and the solar system.
There is also a great range of projects about animals, with some of our favourites being Turtle Tracker which uses real-life data to track their course, Deep Sea Sushi which looks at the impact of plastics in our oceans, and our latest release Fowl Weather, focusing on creating a rain animation.
Art
Creating digital art is a great way to integrate maths and design. By learning how to manipulate length and angles young people can code how to draw different shapes or create fractal art. Some other project ideas are
Flower Generator — create multiple flowers of different size, shape, and colour to create flower wallpaper or an image
Poppies — use the stamping tool to create a poppy field
Mandala — create a program that generates a mandala
Pop Art WA or Pop Art VIC — create pop art based on an Aussie icon
Space Shoe -become a designer of space shoes
Music
Sonic Pi is our go-to music coding program. Learn to code by composing different kinds of music and genres, including classical and electric, and creating your own unique sound by writing code instead of playing keys! (Download required)
Another project that will get you in the music mood is our Binary Code project. Code your keyboard to play different notes, and turn it into a game, as you try to hit every note!
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander perspectives
At Code Club Australia we are proud of the collaborations we have with First Nations communities, sharing their culture through coding. Try the Tagai Constellation project co-created with a year 6 class from Tagai College. Or jump into the Yalanji Quest projects made with Luke that share Yalanji language and their use of lilly pilly fruit. We also have the Dhinawan in the sky project made by Tess, which tells the Goomeri story of the Dark Emu.
Wellbeing
There is a whole group of wellbeing projects, including a Learning Path for Micro:Bits that contains 6 projects to develop the programming skills of Micro:Bit while being focused on a well-being. Create art, design an app to get people moving, or track your sleep.
Happy coding!
Kaye
Code Club Australia
