Today we ran our first lunch time code club! We had a good turn out of 8 or so students and had a look at using the 'Scratch' programming environment. We got the little cat character to move around as we pressed the arrow keys and then used the space bar to trigger a meow sound. Soon we had our cat running around, spinning and a chorus of 8 cats meowing furiously (much to the annoyance of the staff). Good stuff!

Scratch looks really interesting and you can do a lot with it, it has a great community, is graphical so is an easy entry point into programming (you join blocks together rather than typing in a window), and importantly you can use it with hardware too. For example I could use a light detector or a real life sensor/ control of some kind to control my code and vice versa, I could use the programme to control a real life motor or LED etc.