Inspiring the next generation at the Microsoft Dojo, Ireland


GLOBAL HOUR OF CODE Microsoft Ireland-7

Just over three years ago we started hosting a weekly CoderDojo at our Microsoft campus in Sandyford, Dublin. We began with 10 students attending and we’ve seen it grow to 50 students attending with ten Microsoft employee volunteers participating each week. At the weekly sessions the students attending work on Scratch, TouchDevelop, HTML, Javascript and Project Spark. The students all have their own accounts so work on their projects at home and when they come back in each week it’s great to see the progress they’ve been able to make at home themselves.

Hour of Code events take place in Microsoft-1

Last year we were very excited to have one of our coders as a finalist at the National Scratch competition for a golf game he designed. We also had a couple of others shortlisted in the coolest projects category. During the time of the Microsoft CoderDojo club we’ve hosted two events as part of EU Code Week – those events generated great excitement for the students and we saw a spike in our numbers after each. In addition last year we took a lead on rolling out the ‘Hour of Code’ campaign here in Ireland.

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In addition to supporting events around the country we also held one in the Arts Council for the arts community which was particularly interesting and another in Government Buildings for our elected officials. It was a great campaign and I think definitely helped to raise awareness for the need for everyone to have a basic understanding of coding. As our own Microsoft CoderDojo club goes from strength we’re looking forward to seeing what we can do next with our new European partnership with the CoderDojo Foundation.

Hour of Code events take place in Microsoft-4

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