That’s a wrap for the year! Thank you to everyone who made our 2025 coding classes such a success.

Our young coders achieved an incredible amount this year—and we hope they had just as much fun along the way.

We’re now taking a short break to rest, recharge, and plan what’s next. In 2026, we’re excited to be adding a fifth day to our coding schedule, along with some brand-new and exciting programming activities. We can’t wait to dive back in!

If you’re interested in classes for 2026, contact us at admin@codechampions.nz, and we’ll send you dertails.

Have a very Merry Christmas and enjoy the holidays. We’ll see you at the start of Term 1.

---

Code Champions December 2025

Is coding fun? Will it rain tomorrow?

This term one of the codes we created has been for a Magic 8 Ball.

It combines several of the programming concepts we have worked (loops, conditions) on to create a fun and engaging outcome.

---

Code Champions November 2025

Coding classes start again this week. We look forward some awesome coding in the last term of the year.

We’re starting with a ‘loop’ challenge, to create a simple countdown timer (with a suitable explosion at the end, of course!).

---

Code Champions October 2025

Thanks to everyone who joined our holiday course on Roblox Studio.

It was a lot of fun, with some excellent results. We hope you all enjoyed creating your amazing ‘Obbys’!

---

Code Champions September 2025

That’s two weeks done already. Time’s flying!

We have turned our attention this term to making decisions in code – called conditions – where the code executes a different path within a program depending on whether information provided is true or false. The conditionals are: if, else and elif. 

(Elif is a portmanteau of ‘else’ and ‘if’, which has sparked some interesting conversations about these types of words, like brunch and glamping.)

So far, we have coded a Heads/Tails and Die (Dice) simulation, an Odd-Even Number Test, and a Guess the Number Game.

Our young coders have picked up the concept quickly. There a few more challenges using conditions, so it’ll be interesting to see how they go.

---

Code Champions August 2025

We’re busy preparing for the upcoming term. Coding starts next week!

Classes are on Monday (Diocesan School for Girls), Tuesday (St Cuthbert’s College), Wednesday (Saint Kentigern), and Thursday (Saint Kentigern).

If you’d like to know more, please contact info@codechampions.nz

---

Code Champions July 2025

Thanks to all our young coders for their hard work and enthusiasm during the Minecraft and Robotics holiday course at St Cuthbert’s College.

On the first day, they successfully completed several coding challenges and tasks we set for them in Minecraft Education. The following day, we had a lot of fun coding robots. They picked up the methods very quickly and produced some great results, which included a ‘disco’ with dance moves and lights, and a speed test, where they had to calculate how fast the robot could go (from coding the movement, to measuring the track and time, to the maths at the end!).

---

Code Champions July 2025

We challenged students to solve the following puzzle:

A farmer has 10 trees and plants them in 5 rows with 4 trees in each row. How?

The answer is by using a star (Pentagram) shape, as follows:

---

Code Champions June 2025

Term 2’s work for most classes has been based on Python’s Turtle module, which allows students to draw images by using code.

We have gradually learned from the basic instructions (forward, back, left, and right) through to the more complex pendup/pendown (allowing movement around the canvas), color and pensize, and loops.

There’s more to go but results, so far, are looking great. Well done everyone.

---

Code Champions May 2025

You may have been wondering why students received a small plastic duck earlier this term.

A story in the book The Pragmatic Programmer describes how a programmer would carry around a rubber duck and debug their code by forcing themselves to explain it, line-by-line, to the duck.

So, we gave out young coders their very own duck to chat to about any problems they were having with their code!

---

Code Champions April 2025