30th November 2016
CoderDojo Cameroon and KANO
Danielle, CoderDojo Douala Champion, tells us how they got on with the Kano Computer Kits they recieved from the CoderDojo Foundation in partnership with Kano.
Our Dojo is located in a Douala, Cameroon and takes place in 2 well lit rooms, that are spacious enough to hold 5 desks which we can turn into workbenches for the Dojo. We use the KANO kits to host both practical electronics or robotics exercises at our Dojo. The rooms are well organised (many electrical outlets are available, the WiFi signal is excellent) and designed with a warm touch. The working area of the Dojo can host about 3-5 Participants / Workshop + 1 co-ordinator, and we usually have a maximum of 4 different streams simultaneously.
The KANO kits are a compact set of computer parts that our Dojo built very easily. After starting the device, we were happy to realize how engaging, interactive and entertaining the learning challenges were for the kids at the Dojo. We did struggle a bit with our video output here, which was flickering for a while, but our Dojo soon figured out how to solve the issue.
We enjoyed using all the different applications during the session. The applications that were most popular with the Dojo were Pong, Minecraft and Snake, all of these provided a fun way to learn coding visually. The Dojo also used the KANO kits to learn by writing and testing actual blocks in Python or JavaScript. We now see how the Maker /Tester /Builder mindset can be cultivated and communicated between all the participants when playing with this mini computer kit and we hope to encourage this at our Dojo. The KANO Pixel hack is a collection of fun resources that you can use at your next Dojo session and are available here.
We offered one of the kits to our best ninja and we are using the others for Minecraft/python activities at the Dojo!
Thank you team KANO and CoderDojo!
If you have stories from your Dojo that you would like to share with the community please send some images and 200 words to: [email protected]