Three things I learned at the Scratch Conference

At the end of July, I attended the Scratch Conference at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA. This event brought together individuals from all over the world to discuss and share best practices around helping children to create and learn with coding. CoderDojo had a poster session along with the Raspberry Pi Foundation. A little over a year ago, CoderDojo merged with the Raspberry Pi Foundation, so it was great to represent and share about how these two foundations have come together to create spaces for kids to learn how to code.

Here are three things that I learned at the Scratch Conference:

1.Scratch continues to be a great tool for learning

First and foremost, I learned a lot about Scratch, so we had to write a separate post about Scratch 3.0  and all the updates to cover it all. If you haven’t tried it out, it’s an incredible tool for kids and adults to start programming. Check it out!

2.Give Kids the Opportunity to Pose the Problem

I attended the panel discussion, “Rethinking Computation Thinking,” and one of the panelists presented this question to the audience: “Problem solving is great, but what about problem posing. How can we give kids the opportunity to pose the problem?” My background is in education, so this question really struck a chord with me as it reminded of the importance of creating experiences where kids can apply their skills. If we want kids to develop the skills to solve problems, we need to provide experiences where they can practice identifying issues and developing solutions that affect them or their community. At CoderDojo, our team works to create projects where kids can learn to create tools that can help their community such as apps or websites. You can check out our CoderDojo projects here.

 

3. We are Truly a Global Community

At Scratch, I connected with CoderDojo community members from all over the world. I met with Yohei from CoderDojo Japan, Linda from CoderDojo Bologna, and Nicole who volunteers with CoderDojo in Boston, Massachusetts. I also spoke with individuals from India, Brazil, and Portugal who knew of CoderDojo and just wanted to connect when they heard we were present at the Scratch conference! That’s amazing, and we have our CoderDojo community to thank with almost 2,000 Dojos in 100 countries around the world. If your interested in joining the CoderDojo community, visit the CoderDojo website to learn more.