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About This Book

Welcome from Circuit

Hi, I'm Circuit!

Circuit waving welcome I'm the little sky-blue robot who shows up in the margins of every chapter, and I'm here for you — the teacher, librarian, parent, or engineer who is about to start a club. This book is not about how to write code. It's about how to build a club that keeps running after you hand it off to someone else. I'll flag the shortcuts, warn you about the mistakes that sink new clubs, and celebrate with you when a chapter clicks. Let's build something great!

Why This Intelligent Textbook

A coding club is the cheapest, fastest way to give a student the one thing a semester-long class often cannot: a project that was their own idea, that they built themselves, and that they can carry out of the room. Yet most clubs die within two years — not because the students lost interest, but because the club depended on one person, and that person moved, retired, or burned out.

In the United States:

  • Only 60% of U.S. public high schools offer a foundational computer science course, which means two in five students have no in-school path into the subject at all1
  • A single high school CS course raises a student's future earnings by 8% — and by 12% for Black students and 10% for young women1
  • 49% of middle schoolers who are not in an afterschool program would enroll if one were available to them; that is 5.2 million students waiting for a program that does not exist yet2
  • The parents of those students name cost (56%) and transportation (48%) as the top barriers — two problems a volunteer-run club meeting in a school or library is unusually well positioned to solve2
  • Computer and information technology occupations paid a median of \(105,990** in May 2024 against **\)49,500 for all occupations, with roughly 317,700 openings projected each year through 20343

Worldwide:

  • The Raspberry Pi Foundation counts 7,494 active Code Clubs across 102 countries, reaching an estimated 257,000 young people, of whom 43% are girls4
  • 96% of Code Club mentors report that their members gained confidence engaging with technology — a number that says as much about the club format as it does about the curriculum4
  • CoderDojo has passed its fifteenth year with more than 600 active dojos running worldwide, entirely on volunteer effort5

Behind every one of those numbers is a room, a table, a handful of laptops, and an adult who decided to start something. If you are reading this, you are probably about to become that adult.

This book is built on a learning graph of 657 interconnected concepts organized into 15 taxonomy categories — from club charter and background checks through mentor ratios, physical computing safety, kit inventory, budgeting, and AI-assisted registration. Concepts appear only after their prerequisites are established, so the 35 chapters build in dependency order rather than topic order. Throughout the book you will find 129 interactive MicroSims — browser-based simulations you can manipulate to test a room layout, a mentor ratio, or a budget before you commit real money to it. The entire textbook is open source and free: no paywalls, no access codes, no annual editions. It is written at a 10th-grade reading level with every term defined the first time it is used.

What Twelve Years of Coding Clubs Taught Us

I have been running and mentoring coding clubs since 2014. In that time I have worked with clubs of one mentor and three students, and with clubs of 150 students and 50 mentors. Both sizes work. Both fail. They fail for completely different reasons, and almost none of those reasons have anything to do with code. A few lessons show up so consistently that they shaped the structure of this entire book.

Sustainability looks different at every size

A three-student club has one failure mode: the single mentor moves away and the club ends that week. A 150-student club never has that problem and instead drowns in logistics — background checks, room capacity, kit inventory, purchasing, mentor training, and a registration process that has to run without anyone hand-editing a spreadsheet. The chapters on governance, mentor ratios, and succession planning exist because the answer to "how do I keep this alive?" changes as the club grows.

Backpackability is a growth metric

Coding clubs grow virally, and the virus travels in a backpack. A student who can carry a finished project home, pull it out at the lunch table, and hand it to a friend recruits the next three members far more reliably than any flyer, announcement, or parent email. This makes backpackability — can the project physically leave the room and survive the trip? — a real measure of a project's success, not a nice-to-have. When you evaluate a curriculum, ask whether its projects end on a screen or in a hand.

Students will out-work you on their own idea

We have watched this pattern recur for over a decade: a student will spend dozens of hours debugging a project nobody assigned them, and abandon an equivalent project that came from a worksheet. Choice is not a motivational garnish. It is the engine. Much of the curriculum guidance in this book is organized around giving students a genuine choice early and then supporting the consequences of that choice.

Small observations compound

We keep a set of demonstration project boxes for open houses and first meetings. At one event we noticed that the projects in clear plastic boxes were picked up far more often than identical projects in opaque boxes. So now every demo box is clear. We later added a QR code on the back of each box that opens the project's page, and engagement went up again. Neither change cost anything. Neither one would show up in a curriculum plan. This is the habit worth building: write down what you observe after every meeting, change one small thing, and watch what happens. Continuous improvement is what separates the clubs that last from the clubs that were fun for a year.

How to Use This Book

The chapters build on each other, so reading in order is recommended for a first pass. After that, the book is designed to be used as a reference — jump to the chapter you need the week you need it. The book includes:

  • 35 chapters covering club foundations, charter and safety, launching and session design, mentors and ratios, scheduling and events, computational thinking, physical computing, project kits, device management, student data, motivation, access and equity, funding, AI agents, and long-term oversight
  • 129 MicroSims — interactive simulations embedded in the chapters
  • 35 chapter quizzes with 350 questions to check your understanding
  • A glossary of 657 terms with ISO 11179-style definitions
  • An FAQ with 70 common questions
  • A learning graph you can explore visually to see how the 657 concepts connect
  • Challenge cards, illustrated stories, and appendices with reusable forms, kickoff flyers, and AI agent skills you can adapt for your own club
  • Search, available from the bar at the top of any page

Start with the Learning Graph if you want to see the whole territory before picking a route, or with Chapter 1: What Is a Coding Club if you would rather just begin.

About the Author

Dan McCreary is a semi-retired AI researcher, solution architect, and educator who has spent more than three decades helping Fortune 100 organizations reason over massive datasets. At Optum he founded the Generative AI Center of Excellence and led the team that built one of the world's largest healthcare knowledge graphs — spanning over 25 billion vertices — to unify member, provider, and patient insights. That background in knowledge representation and systems thinking underpins the precise learning graphs and intelligent-textbook workflows used throughout this book.

He is the co-author of Making Sense of NoSQL (Manning Publications), the founding chair of the NoSQL Now! conference, and a frequent keynote speaker on semantic search, ontology strategy, and AI hardware. He has mentored students as a STEM volunteer since 2014, running coding clubs that ranged from three students around one table to 150 students supported by 50 mentors, and the observations from those years are the raw material for this book. You can visit the Intelligent Textbooks Case Studies to see over 87 textbooks that Dan has created or co-created with other authors.

Selected Credentials

  • B.A. in Physics and Computer Science from Carleton College
  • M.S.E.E. from the University of Minnesota
  • MBA coursework at the University of St. Thomas
  • Patent holder in semantic search and ontology management techniques
  • Advocate for large-scale Enterprise Knowledge Graph adoption across healthcare and education
  • STEM volunteer and coding club mentor since 2014
  • Long-time promoter of accessible, low-cost AI-powered learning experiences

How to Cite This Book

If you reference this textbook in academic work, curriculum proposals, grant applications, lesson plans, or other publications, please use one of the following citation formats.

APA (7th edition)

McCreary, D. (2026). Coding Club. https://dmccreary.github.io/coding-club/

Chicago (17th edition)

McCreary, Dan. 2026. Coding Club. https://dmccreary.github.io/coding-club/.

MLA (9th edition)

McCreary, Dan. Coding Club. 2026, dmccreary.github.io/coding-club/.

BibTeX

@book{mccreary2026codingclub,
  title     = {Coding Club},
  subtitle  = {How to Create, Organize, Promote and Manage a Sustainable Coding Club},
  author    = {McCreary, Dan},
  year      = {2026},
  url       = {https://dmccreary.github.io/coding-club/},
  note      = {Interactive intelligent textbook}
}

To cite a specific chapter, append the chapter number and title — for example:

McCreary, D. (2026). Chapter 1: What Is a Coding Club. In Coding Club. https://dmccreary.github.io/coding-club/chapters/01-what-is-a-coding-club/

License

This work is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0). You are free to share and adapt the material for non-commercial purposes as long as you give appropriate credit and share your adaptations under the same license. Teachers, librarians, and club leaders are explicitly encouraged to fork this book and rewrite it for their own community.

Questions, corrections, or a story about your own club? See the Contact page.

References

  1. Code.org Advocacy Coalition. (2025). 2025 State of AI + Computer Science Education Report. https://advocacy.code.org/stateofcs/ ↩↩

  2. Afterschool Alliance. (2025). America After 3PM (5th edition), based on a national household survey of more than 30,000 parents and guardians. https://afterschoolalliance.org/AA3PM/landing/ ↩↩

  3. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. (2025). Occupational Outlook Handbook: Computer and Information Technology Occupations, 2024–2034 projections. https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/ ↩

  4. Raspberry Pi Foundation. (2025). Code Club Annual Survey Report 2025. https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/discover-the-incredible-impact-of-code-club-the-code-club-annual-survey-report-2025/ ↩↩

  5. Raspberry Pi Foundation. (2026). From one club to a global movement: Celebrating 15 years of CoderDojo. https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/from-one-club-to-a-global-movement-celebrating-15-years-of-coderdojo/ ↩