Google is funding coding clubs network’s training program to teach computing skills to UK primary school teachers. The program will support teachers who will be responsible for teaching 5-year-olds to code, as part of the government’s refreshed primary curriculum.

Code Club is planning to train over 20,000 teachers by 2016. Established two years ago, Code Club reached 125 after-school clubs run by volunteers in its first month, and currently accounts for 2,000 around the United Kingdom. Google invests in the project in frames of its wider funding for computer science education in the country. For example, the company has paid for 15,000 Raspberry Pi computers for UK schools and funded the Computing at School organization. The latter will be a partner in the Code Club Pro initiative.

Google explained that after computer science is approved in the curriculum for September 2014, the company’s aim is to make sure it is a reality, and that teachers are ready to teach it and inspire kids to get involved. The Code Club training sessions will be complemented by Internet resources and are supposed to encourage teachers to apply the computer science in a range of subjects (maths, science and English).

Learning programming skills is supposed to benefit kids in different ways. First of all, it is learning how to program computers and do interesting things with them, but it also teaches kids to solve problems, work as a team, understand documentation, and think about strategy and planning.

Parents are expected to have an important role to play as well: first of all, they should be encouraging, sitting down with children and helping them believe that computer science is an important and useful thing. However, there is also a cultural shift needed to be made for sciences generally – including maths, physics, and chemistry. The problem is that there’s far too much of the attitude that those are not fundamental subjects, so children do not need to worry about them so much.

At the moment, 170 new clubs are registering every month, and parents will have a big impact on the success of the computing science since September. Their opinions will have a huge influence over what kids will choose to be interested in.