Our favourite content from 2017

2017 has been a busy year for us here in the CoderDojo Foundation and we’ve certainly been busy on the Content team! We’ve produced over a dozen sets of Sushi Cards and worked with the community to publish, on average, a piece of community created content a week! We’ve also had several amazing interns work with us on various projects throughout the year and you’ve either seen or will see work from Ben, Justin, and Harvey appear as part of a CoderDojo Foundation content release on Kata.

Our favourite content from 2017

It was hard to choose, and we cheated a little, but here’s our top five pieces of content from 2017, mostly rated on how much fun we had making them and how cool it is to see Ninjas working through them!

• The Mini-sushi cards that were included with the Girls Packs are great not only for use at your regular Dojo but also, because they’re deliberately short, for use at events like MegaDojos and pop-up Dojos.
• Because of the season that’s in it, we have to include our Falling Snowflakes Challenge Card, which offers Ninjas the challenge of building their own digital winter snowscape.
• For a bit of hands on fun (and, keeping with the season, consider a christmas tree in place of a smiley face!), we’re quite fond of the Intermediate Wearables Sushi Cards.
• Opening up the world of mobile app development to Ninjas who’ve a bit of programming experience, even with a block-based language like Scratch, we released our first set of App Inventor Sushi Cards where Ninjas can use block based code to make a quiz!
• Finally, for both its ability to offer some real technical learning and its ability to stick the Pokémon theme song in your head for a week, we couldn’t leave our our Advanced JavaScript Sushi Cards.

Highlights of the year

We started the year with some shifts in how we make Sushi Cards based on our annual survey results, to better support the majority of Dojos that use educational content digitally, as well making it easier for community members to make use of those same tools to create Sushi Cards for their own Dojos, or to share with the community.

In March, Ciara joined the content team and has helped us produce great resources, including several sets of Sushi Cards, the Mini-Sushi with the Girls Guide and parts of that Guide itself. She’s also worked with dozens of community members throughout the year to collect and share resources from their Dojos on Kata, so everyone in the CoderDojo movement can find and benefit from them.

 

Once the summer rolled around, of course, we hit the highlight of the CoderDojo year: Coolest Projects! We always love to meet the CoderDojo community and to hear from Ninjas about the amazing things they’re getting up to at their Dojos. This year, I also got to give a talk about Mentoring at your Dojo, even if you don’t know how to code! You can check out the slides here.

We also had the amazing experience of joining with the Raspberry Pi Foundation this year and discovering how much more we could achieve by working together. We’ve collaborated in many areas over the last few months, including working together on pieces of content. You’ll be seeing a lot more in that space in the coming year, as we move towards using the shared Raspberry Pi Foundation learning platform. If you’d like to be part of our early tests of the platform, let us know!

A close second behind Coolest Projects is DojoCon, and this year I was lucky enough to get to two of them! I got to go to the world-wide DojoCon in Warrington, but also to DojoCon Belgium in Brussels. At both, I got to speak to the Mentors and Champions of many different Dojos and to talk to them about the Content team’s plans for the future, including our ever-improving translation strategy and our increasing focus on materials for Volunteers in 2018.

We’ve also had the opportunity to visit many Dojos this year, probably too many for me to list here, but I’d like to thank each of them for letting us come by and see how they do things so we can collect their ideas and share them with the community! I’m looking forward to seeing lots more of you in 2018!