By Bryony | Partnerships and Grants Manager
Dear Friend,
I hope this message finds you well.
Technology is changing our world, and we believe that every young person deserves the chance to shape this. Generous donors like you make this possible!
Since our last update to you we celebrated an exciting milestone.. our 10TH BIRTHDAY! Ten years ago the first CoderDojo session was held in Cork, Ireland, by teenager James Whelton and entrepreneur Bill Liao. Since then we have reached thousands of young people across the world!
Happy Birthday to us!
To mark 10 years of CoderDojo, we launched a Birthday Giveaway, encouraging young people to join in with the celebrations with birthday-themed coding projects. Young people from Dojos worldwide, as well as those new to CoderDojo, are invited to create a project during the month of October with a birthday or celebratory theme.
We received 100 entries from young people from 15 different countries, with projects in Scratch, Python, HTML, C++, TinkerCad and more. Projects were selected for their creativity, originality, presentation and use of code.
We were so blown away by the projects people sent us! Winners include Ian and Brian from CoderDojo Maitama in Nigeria, who wowed our judges with their website, which celebrates all they love about CoderDojo. They used HTML to structure the website, CSS for the rainbow backdrop and Javascript for making the button interactive so a message appears when it is clicked [ Watch their project here! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zhQOay5Qd0&t=37s ].
Millie from the Cromar Future Group Dojo in Scotland also made a fun game in Scratch called Candle Catastrophe [ https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/579099970/ ]. The player uses controls to move a birthday cake to dodge water balloons, which will extinguish the lit candles on the cake. Great work Millie!
Brilliant volunteers
As local restrictions continue to vary across the world, we have been working with our club volunteers to support them in restarting their clubs. Our team have been on-hand to provide one-to-one support as well as share shiny new resources, like our Club Organiser Pack. This is jam-packed with resources for club sessions and valuable tips to help volunteers feel confident running them. It includes coding project collections and session plans to make it easy for clubs to get started, as well as crib sheets and GIFs for volunteers’ to use on social accounts and celebrate #MyCodeClub activity.
We also shared themed coding projects to motivate young people. Our Summer of Sport collection encouraged clubs to get involved in coding over the summer holidays. We also curated our Environmental Project Collection to align with the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference (31 October–12 November) and space themed projects during Space Week to engage learners on the run-up to Astro Pi 2022 (our coding in space programme).
Bringing the community together
We know how important it is to provide spaces for volunteers to connect and build confidence in getting started with their clubs. Our team has delivered interactive webinars for volunteers this quarter covering topics like Restarting with Scratch and Introduction to Physical Computing, which provides an overview of using hardware (like our new Raspberry Pi Pico) in club sessions. These have been really well received, with 80% of participants telling us they feel more confident to start their clubs. Hurrah!
Looking ahead
As restrictions evolve, we stay close to our community to keep listening and responding with focussed support, including sharing more on our Astro Pi programme (help your club members send their code into space!) and plans for getting involved in Coolest Projects 2022.
Thanks for helping us to keep our CoderDojo community coding!
Wishing you all the best,
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