CoderDojo - Support kids learning to code globally

Helping young people learn from home 

Dear Friend,

I hope this message finds you well. 

Not enough young people have the opportunity to learn about technology through making. We want to change this and that is only made possible because of donors like you who support our mission.  

Since our last update to you, we have been working hard to engage, listen and respond to the needs of our passionate global community. Your donation is helping us to continue supporting our clubs as the landscape of local restrictions continues to evolve.

Supporting our Community

Since June, more of our clubs have been running online and some are starting to open in-person. We’ve been developing and delivering lots of free guidance and resources to support our club volunteers. These offer best practice on how to run your club online and in-person safely, how to run engaging online sessions and how to keep young people safe. To date we’ve run 21 webinars and community calls, with over 1500 people watching so far. Volunteers are telling us our webinars have helped them to set-up clubs in new formats:

“I think this training was great — I feel like I'm well set up for getting the Code Club sessions underway and the children enjoying them! I think the course covered everything we need for now very clearly, and in a really friendly, encouraging tone” - Course participant

Sharing Learnings

We’ve also been bringing our global community together to share learning across borders. For exampleLeeds Libraries Club shares their  top three tips for running a successful online club to inspire the wider community. They have adapted their Clubs and established a thriving online coding community as part of their #LibrariesFromHome offer. 

One volunteer cites: “Lars (Leeds Code Club attendee, aged 9) has really enjoyed it.. [..] it’s given them something to do and new skills to learn in lockdown. Lars says: it’s ‘very, very, very fun’”.

We’ve also introduced lots of exciting new online coding projects for clubs and young people to engage in, like our new ‘Look After yourself’ module. 

New Collaborations

Other Dojos are working together in new ways to reach young people. In northern Italy, a network of CoderDojos has banded together to create a series of large-scale online events where over 100 regular attendees at a time can meet, code and collaborate.

Learning from Home

Our new Digital making at Home live stream code-along series is also full steam ahead. In direct response to the pandemic we have been delivering a live stream every week which is accessible by learners all over the world. Topics have ranged from machine learning to keeping the planet green.. to coding in space!  

We’ve delivered 29 live sessions so far, with thousands of viewers tuning in in the UK, US, India and across the world.

You can watch back the live streams here, or check out our latest online coding projects ‘Look after yourself’ and ‘Protect our planet’ on our website.

We look forward to updating you soon on our plans for 2021. Thanks for helping us to keep our community coding!

Wishing you all the best,

Bryony

Hello

I hope this message finds you well. Thank you again for your on-going support. Your donation helps us continue to support our global community through these very challenging times.

In my last update to you, we were in rapid response mode, supporting a global community through the pandemic by creating the resources and supports that they said were most urgent. Since then, we have been building on all of these great supports and creating lots of fantastic educational content, but we’ve also taken the time to celebrate the amazing achievements of young makers across the globe!

Celebrate Community!

As you might know, for the last eight years the world’s leading tech showcase, Coolest Projects, has been the annual highlight for our community. Thousands of young people from around the world showcased their creations at events in the UK, US and the international event in Ireland. 

After consulting with community members everyone agreed that it would be a huge loss to cancel this annual celebration of creativity. So, this year, Coolest Projects moved online and the response was phenomenal! We had the biggest ever international representation, up from 18 countries last year. Young tech creators from 39 countries took part including lots of representatives from Ireland, Australia, Palestine, UK, USA, India, and Indonesia. In total, you’ll find an incredible 560 projects from 775 young creators in the showcase gallery. We highly recommend you grab yourself a cup of tea and take some time to check out all the wonderful projects presented by creators around the world.

We invited VIP judges — Eben Upton, Hayaatun Sillem, Limor Fried, Mitch Resnick, and Tim Peake — who have chosen their favourite projects from the Coolest Projects online showcase. You can check out the judges' highlights on our blog here 

Behind the scenes

Our development team has been working hard over the last few months to deliver additional benefits to all our community members on the CoderDojo platform. CoderDojo accounts are now connected to Raspberry Pi Foundation accounts (this platform belongs to the wider Foundation that CoderDojo is a part of), users can avail of all the current features associated with your CoderDojo account, along with additional new features and great benefits.

• Increased functionality on the projects site, like saving your progress while working through a project
• The ability to ‘favourite’ projects, which allows users to have your favourite projects easily available on next login
• Smoother project registration for Coolest Projects online, as Raspberry Pi accounts were already integrated with the Coolest Projects platform
• The same ability to create and/or book into events, along with all the other benefits available throughCoderDojo account’s

Annual Survey

Each year the annual survey helps us understand our community more and helps us plan and develop more resources that are most in-demand. You can check out the details here. Of course, a lot has changed since we conducted the annual survey in the autumn of last year. The restrictions have meant that most Dojos around the world are currently operating very differently to how they were before. As of May 2020, based on a sample of over 500 replies, we understand that roughly: 

• 22% of Dojos are running their sessions online
• 7% are sending activities to their Ninjas
• 59% are paused for now

As a result of that, our team is still working hard to ensure we are doing all we can to support our community whether that is in assisting clubs to move online or continuing to provide weekly code-along videos via our Digital Making at Home programme. In response to community feedback, we now are running weekly livestreams at 2 pm GMT, do check them out if you get a chance!

I hope you'll have the chance to check out all the new videos and content and the wonderful Coolest Projects showcase. Thank you so much for your support and as always we appreciate you taking the time to share our work with your friends and family, or even better encourage them to try out their first project and share it with us!

Wishing you all the best,

Sarah