Creating Content for your Dojo

Picking up from last week’s post about using pre-written educational material from the CoderDojo website in your Dojo, I’m going to talk about how to create original material that looks good and is easy to create and share.

Sushi Card Generator

You may have noticed that the last few sets of Sushi Cards we released look pretty similar. This is because we’ve created some tools that take simple Markdown text files, which you can write with something as simple as Notepad, and convert them into consistently formatted, visually engaging Sushi Cards. Like this one:

Getting setup with the Sushi Card Generator

Today, that tool is publicly available for anyone to use. One of our community members, Diego (@diegogd) from Madrid in Spain, has built a wrapper called Chopsticks around it to make it much easier to use.

You can get Chopsticks (which should install all the other parts for you) here. Instructions for using it are also on that page. Note that you will need to install Node first.

How to write Markdown for Sushi Cards

I’ve made a Sushi Card to teach you how the Sushi Generator specially treats a few pieces of Markdown to add a few features that are useful.

You can find that here.

Guidelines for writing Sushi Cards

We’ve also created some guidance on factors to consider in writing Sushi Cards that you can use to take some of the planning effort out of it for you. This is a draft version and we’d love your input on things to add and change.

Sharing your work with the CoderDojo Community

You can share a resource with the community by publishing it on the CoderDojo website, allowing everyone to benefit from your work. You can find details on how to do that here.

You can also create a whole Path of resources, composed of several Sushi Series, which provide a direction through a topic and can also suggest what to do afterwards. Details on doing that are here.

CoderDojo Foundation Content Repository

Finally, to test the new Sushi Card generator, you can get the newly published repository of all the CoderDojo Foundation’s recent Sushi Card releases here. Feel free to add translations and your own Sushi Cards (in the same markdown format only, please) to the repository. We hope it can become a resource for content related projects by the community at large.

Also, Game Design

You’ll notice that there’s a new set of Game Design Sushi Cards in there, about the theory of building a compelling game. You can get the PDF for your Dojo here. I’d like to thank the folks from Riot Games for helping us create that particular resource!

 

I hope this collection of tools and resources makes it easier for you to create great, and great-looking, resources to use at your Dojo