During the Autumn Term last year the University of Surrey Wider Participation team* contacted local schools (including Gordon's) to invite them to bring pupils along to a coding hub to get a better understanding of how to code using the programming language ‘Python’. The sessions were hosted at the University of Surrey and delivered by PhD students with hundreds of hours of programming experience. Mr Walters attended last autumn with a group of Year 10 and 11 students to enable them to get a better understanding of programming to assist with their GCSE course.

In early 2015 the university were looking for a new location to host the hubs and Woking High School offered. Having met up with the computing teacher at Woking High, Ahmed Afana, at several Surrey events he and Mr Walters hatched the plan to coordinate a joint after school coding club that meets at Woking High every other Thursday with the delivery of Python programming challenges from the University of Surrey. Mr Walters launched a "coding club" Period 7 at Gordon's primarily targeted at Year 9 but is currently made up of Year 8, 9 and 10 pupils. When the Arête Partnership between Woking High and Gordon’s was launched last Easter, this became an even more exciting prospect to work between schools. Initially the sessions will focus on the building up of skills and understanding of programming in Python and will develop toward the use of robotics (using Galileo Boards and simple cars made by the Woking High D&T Department), cyber security and hopefully launching a probe into space in the New Year.

*The University of Surrey Wider Participation (WP) team look to get more students from backgrounds that statistically do not study at university as much as other groups, for example those who come from countries other than UK, women for computer science and those whose parents do not have a degree.