After-school clubs nurture tomorrow's coders Primary code: pupils learn to design their own games A parrot and a lion racing through the desert was the subject of 10-year-old Shakil's favourite computer game. Mymuna, aged nine, says she preferred Whack a Witch, where sorceresses flew through a forest on broomsticks. These children did not just play the games - they built them. "I never thought it would be that hard to make games and now I know it's really, really hard," says Moha­med, aged eight. But the thing that I like is that I've made many games, and now I'm in the lead. Mohamed, Mymuna and Shakil are students at William Davis Primary in east London, one of 1,500 schools across the UK taking part in Code Club, a fast-growing, non-profit network of after-school groups that aims to nurture the next generation of developers. "We all know how great children are at using technology but we think they should be able to understand and make it too," says Clare Sutcliffe, Code Club's co-founder and a former web designer who launched the initiative in April last year. In a world where automation put traditional jobs under pressure, Ms Sutcliffe's group is part of a global push to prepare workers for a time when coding is king. The internet was abuzz last week with the news that a homeless man in New York is learning to program as a way out of poverty. Adult academies have sprung up in most big cities. In the UK, a quarter of all jobs created between 2012 and 2017 will be in science and technology, according to the Centre for Economic and Business Research. But the country suffers from a serious lack of high-tech workers, prompting Michael Gove, the education secretary, to put programming in the national curriculum from September 2014. Code Club, which provides volunteers with the materials and support to run classes, receives financial support from Google, Samsung and microchip designer Arm . Such companies seem to recognise that their future hinges not just on pushing skills but also on growing the talent pool of developers by encouraging social mobility. This week, the Canary Wharf Group, owner of the monoliths that house some of the world's big financial institutions, said it would sponsor Code Club for £50,000, and push to get clubs into 75 per cent of schools in its borough, Tower Hamlets, within a year. "We have just started a journey towards the next phase of Canary Wharf where we expect to have many more companies from the tech sector," said Sir George Iacobescu, group chairman, at a launch event at Level 39, the company's start-up accelerator. We want local young people to get a start in this tech revolution. It helps that Code Club comes as large corporations and banks are trying to burnish their image in the face of growing attention to income inequality after the financial crisis. Canary Wharf has the greatest concentration of developers in London, according to Ms Sutcliffe. But it has been criticised for failing to spread its wealth around Tower Hamlets, which is the most deprived borough in the capital and from which it recruits only one in 10 of its workers. Morgan Stanley, the global investment bank, has offered 50 developers to run clubs. "We've been bowled over by the kids" enthusiasm: you really see a huge mix of people," says Charles Clarke, an employee in the bank's technology and data department who volunteers at William Davis Primary. Forty per cent of club members are girls. While Mr Clarke agrees with Morgan Stanley that promoting diversity is an important initiative, he says that giving back to the community is just as satisfying. "It reminds me how exciting it was to learn to program," says Mr Clarke.