First Coding

27/09/2026

First Coding is excited to launch a brand-new creative coding club at Wilton Primary School after the half-term break! If your child loves gaming and wants to build their own Scratch projects, then look out for details and sign-up info in this week’s parent newsletter.

15/09/2026

GCSE Computer Science Tuition!

Ready to boost your child's confidence and skills in Computer Science? With ten years of experience delivering GCSE tuition and engaging programming lessons, First Coding still has limited slots available! Spaces fill up fast and as such we only have availability left for Thursday evenings. For more information, click here: https://www.firstcoding.co.uk/classes/

10/09/2026

Whether your young games designer spends hours sketching out original world ideas or tinkering with Scratch to build playable levels, next month's Scratch workshops are for them! The BAFTA Young Game Designers Awards will be opening their doors very soon once again for entries and throughout October, First Coding will be running a series of workshops to help budding game designers build their ideas and helping them get their games ready for submission (if they want to) to this national competition.

Perfect for: Beginners / Intermediates.

Age range: 8-12*
Day: Saturday
Dates: 3rd, 10th and 17th October 2026
Time: 10am – 11am
Venue: The Underground Studios, Harnham
Cost: £30 for 3 lessons.

* Age range is just a guide

For more information and to book, click here: https://first-coding.pembee.app/activity/6a86f1baf6b4ff7f1f09a423

07/09/2026

A new school years brings new workshops. Next week a new round of after-school coding clubs start at Bishop Wordworth's School. These have been hugely successful over the last eight years First Coding have been running them, so if you have a Year 7 or know of a parent of a Year 7 starting at BWS, then a newsletter is going out shortly with further details about our coding clubs.

31/08/2026

As we open up and prepare The Bunker for this coming term, just listen to that rain we had yesterday!

23/08/2026

Learn the basics of using the Microbit, then build skills over the two weeks in September as we work towards creating a simple game that runs directly on the Microbit hardware. This workshop is perfect for beginners or those with a little coding experience who want to explore physical computing with a gaming theme, in a hands-on way.
Perfect for: Beginners / Intermediates.

Age range: 10-14*
Day: Saturday
Dates: 19th and 26th September 2026
Time: 10am – 11am
Venue: The Underground Studios, Harnham
Cost: £20 for 2 lessons.

*Age range guide only.

For more information and to book, click here: https://first-coding.pembee.app/activity/6a89b72db7aefc95430a3151

All Microbit boards needed for the sessions will be provided for use during the workshop. Please note that the boards cannot be taken home.

20/08/2026

Huge congratulations to all my GCSE Computer Science students today! Everyone across my tutor groups achieved fantastic results, including a group of Year 10 students who sat their exams a year early and secured top grades.

Every student put in the dedicated effort, and seeing their hard work pay off is just the best reward ever and confirms to me, after a pretty difficult year dealing with scammers, the good work First Coding is doing.

My tuition groups basically come in a couple of flavours:
Targeted School Support: Dedicated tuition for students taking GCSE Computer Science at school who want to strengthen weaker topics and who need extra help with exam technique.

Independent Study: Comprehensive, structured classes for students taking the qualification independently outside of school.

If you know a student preparing for their Computer Science exams who could benefit from structured guidance, feel free to reach out. More details can be found here: https://www.firstcoding.co.uk/classes/

19/08/2026

First Coding hasn't run summer workshops for a while because juggling other family’s schedules has been tricky in previous years as some could make one week but not others – that sort of thing. This year, however, I had a brilliant work experience student join me and so we put together a scheme of work, giving Ollie hands-on experience with everything from lesson planning and prep to actual delivery. Ollie was actually one of my GCSE Computer science students who took his exam in Year 10 and will pick up his result on Thursday. Good Luck to everyone collecting their results this week!

Thank you to Jez and Ollie from First Coding for hosting two coding events with us at the shop this week, and thank you to all those who came along to start creating your own games.

If you attended the event, you might like to have a copy of the worksheet Ollie has put together that goes through the steps of the game you made in the workshop. You can find that here -http://www.firstcoding.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/Collectables-Worksheet.pdf

Jez will be running his regular Saturday coding clubs again in Harnham once term starts. If you'd like more info on that you can sign up for his newsletter here - https://www.firstcoding.co.uk/newsletter/

06/08/2026

Did you know we have a newsletter? If you're a parent, the newsletter is the best way to keep informed of all of First Coding's news including up and coming workshops. You can read the latest one here: https://mailchi.mp/d1d3a57d05ac/game-design-assembly-talks-for-schools-14194796

Follow the link to subscribe: https://www.firstcoding.co.uk/newsletter/

27/07/2026

Hello! I hope the school holidays are going well for everyone. I just wanted to let you know that I'll be running the Great South Run for charity in October. I didn't get a place in next year's London Marathon but I still have a place in my "warm up" run.

I'm running for CodeBar, a charity that facilitates the growth of a diverse tech community by running free regular programming workshops for underrepresented groups in tech. First Coding has previously helped coach some of their Southampton groups, so it's nice to be able to support the charity in other ways.

Any donations are so gratefully received: https://donate.giveasyoulive.com/fundraising/run-as-administrator

Thank you.