How To Start A Code Club At School

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Are you a coder or code-curious student in a K-12 school?

Start a Code Club to unite your friends for code and game dev!

Contact Us

Email clubs@primerlabs.com for more information to help you set up your club.

Request Mentors & Speakers

You can request mentors to come to your Code Club and teach you and your members to help you get started and to take your skills to the next level.

You can also request speakers to come and talk to your code club including some of the very code heroes featured in the Humantheon Code Hero Hall!

Volunteer To Become A Mentor and/or Speaker

Are you willing to teach others? Volunteer to be a mentor and you could help others set up their Code Clubs!

If you're willing to talk to groups and tell them about your experiences as a real-life code hero, you can also volunteer to be a speker.

Use Code Hero to interest other students in coding

Code Hero is a game you can use to introduce your fellow students in programming. Once they try the game, they'll get an idea of how powerful coding can be and they might be interested in making their own video games using Unity3D.

Activity Ideas

Here are some ideas for a high school computer club:

  • coding projects, robotics (arduino is pretty easy to get into) and robotics competitions,
  • coding competitions
  • making and hosting a website/server
  • play computer games and disucss what makes them fun and how they are made
  • make computer games using tools like Unity3D, GameMAker and GameSalad
  • You could even cater to students who would like to learn how to code but never have started and have mini-lectures at the beginning of a meeting.
  • You could find experts from hackerspaces or universities or friends of your members and their parents.
  • Watch movies like Pirates of Silicon Valley and The Social Network

Visit The Office Without Being In Trouble

Find out the exact protocol needed to start a club in your high school. When you get some free time, go into the main office and make a general inquiry. You may need to gather signatures, or find a sponsor. My friends started an anime and gaming club at my school in a similar manner. 

Get A Sponsor

Talk to a teacher who teaches Comp Sci classes at your school, and ask if they would be interested in sponsoring a Comp Sci club. Perhaps they can even give you more ideas than what I suggested. Ask them to ask their students if they would be interested in joining a club. It will help gather up student interest. 

Connect With Hackerspaces

Find out if there are hackerspaces in your area and bring your members there to learn and participate.

The History of Computer Clubs that Changed the World

Chaos Computer Club

The CCC was founded in Berlin on September 12, 1981 at the Kommune 1's table in the rooms of the newspaper Die Tageszeitung by Wau Holland and others in anticipation of the prominent role that information technology would play in the way people live and communicate. The CCC went on to spread chapters to cities all across Germany which inspired CBase and the international hackerspaces movement. The CCC hosts the annual Chaos Communication Congress, Europe's biggest hacker congress, with over 9,000 participants. Every four years, the Chaos Communication Camp is the outdoor alternative for hackers worldwide.

MIT Tech Model Railroad Club: The Original Hackers

The Tech Model Railroad Club (TMRC) is a student organization at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and one of the most celebrated model railroad clubs in the world, because of its historic role as a wellspring of hacker culture. Read the history of TMRC giving birth to hacker culture:

It was based on early hackers, like at MIT, that Steven Levy developed the "Hacker Ethic" in his landmark 1984 book:


The Hacker Ethic

1. Access to computers - and anything which might teach you something about the way the world works - should be unlimited and total. Always yield to the Hands-On imperative! 
2. All information should be free. 
3. Mistrust authority - promote decentralization. 
4. Hackers should be judged by their hacking, not bogus criteria such as degrees, age, race, or position. 
5. You can create art and beauty on a computer. 
6. Computers can change your life for the better.

 

Homebrew Computer Club: The Birthplace of Personal Computers

The Homebrew Computer Club was an early computer hobbyist club in Silicon Valley, which met (under that name) from March 5, 1975 to December 1986. Several very high-profilehackers and IT entrepreneurs emerged from its ranks, including the founders of Apple Inc. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak.

Introducing People

"Wozniak, there's someone you need to meet. He's into pranks and electronics too. His name is Steve Jobs. " It would be one of the most important introductions in history.

–Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs

Introducing creative people to each other to hack on projects together can have incredibly far-reaching effects on their creative careers. Form communities of peers that can collaborate and explore new ideas together.