International Day of Education today, January 24, is a handy excuse to look past slogans and ask what actually keeps young people learning to code week after week. It’s easy to talk about “digital skills” in the abstract, but the real test is whether learners come back, stay curious, and feel confident enough to try things, break things, and fix them again.
 

Comic-style poster reading “International Day of Education 2026,” with a Code Club scene, a Raspberry Pi board, electronics projects, and an ElektorMAG badge.
International Day of Education 2026: coding clubs and hands-on electronics put learning in students’ hands.


In a Raspberry Pi Foundation roundup of Code Clubs worldwide, the differences are obvious: clubs meet in libraries, schools, community centers, and makerspaces; some groups share a single laptop while others rotate through boards and sensors; and local norms shape everything from attendance to how newcomers are welcomed. What is more interesting is what stays consistent. The clubs that thrive tend to set a simple baseline for behavior (respect), keep the atmosphere low-pressure, and let learners build things they actually want to show someone else.
 

Local Constraints, Practical Fixes

The post gives examples that feel very real. In Gujarat, a small change — allowing girls to attend school wearing traditional attire — helped remove a barrier, and the learners went on to create Scratch projects with visible confidence. In Kenya, a club leader started with just one laptop and expanded what was possible by borrowing space, applying for grants, and arranging equipment so children could collaborate. In Wales, a library Code Club has run for more than a decade, and older learners naturally guide new ones, with “respect” described as the one rule that matters.

There are also snapshots of what “joyful learning” looks like in practice. One U.S. club meets across three venues and a librarian was inspired enough to start learning alongside the learners. In India, learners demonstrated text-to-speech and video-sensing projects at a showcase event and explained their logic to parents and mentors. In the U.K., a physical-computing activity turned into a room full of clicking and squeaking as learners adapted a beginner project in their own creative ways.
 

Why the Club Format Works

These stories line up neatly with the International Day of Education 2026 theme of youth participation in shaping education, because the club format is inherently participatory. Learners remix each other’s work, debug together on shared hardware, and sometimes run taster sessions or code-alongs for newcomers. The payoff is more than technical skill: confidence, belonging, and the sense that learning is something you do with people rather than something done to you.
 


For anyone running a school club, library session, or makerspace meetup, the message is blunt: you do not need the “right” model, you need the right conditions. Make attendance easy, normalize debugging, and create obvious on-ramps for peer mentoring. For a beginner-friendly starting point that fits short sessions, Elektor previously covered a free browser-based editor aimed at young learners. For the UN-side framing of the day, UNESCO’s 2026 participation guide is a useful reference.

On International Day of Education, the takeaway is simple: local flexibility is a feature, not a bug, as long as the shared values stay non-negotiable.