Resources

2 April 2019 · by Nuala McHale

Fiona found it difficult to find suitable extra-curricular activities for her son, who is autistic and needs 1-1 adult support. It’s a problem she knows is shared by other families. As a volunteer with Autism Northern Ireland and a founding committee member of the Tech Education Network CIC she was interested in developing outreach work focusing on inclusion and special educational needs. Below she shares how she discovered CoderDojo as a solution, and how others can learn to make their spaces more autistic-friendly. I wanted to start a club and began exploring CoderDojo, firstly… Read More

29 March 2019 · by Kevin Johnson

“They all show up and they all want to do good, for each other” We have loved celebrating the incredible women in our CoderDojo community this month, especially because we’ve had the opportunity to hear some of their empowering stories. On International Women’s Day, we spent the morning speaking with Nikole Vaughn, one of the CoderDojo champions at the San Antonio CoderDojo Collaborative, to learn more about what she is doing to foster the next generation of female coders. Nikole is a woman with many titles: mother,… Read More

8 January 2019 · by Nuala McHale

It’s that time of year when many Dojos are returning back after the new year. To help you get back into the swing of things we’re highlighting some of the awesome free online courses you and your mentors can take part in to upskill in in 2019! Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty. Anyone who keeps learning stays young. – Henry Ford   Our FutureLearn courses Starting a CoderDojo First up is our Starting a CoderDojo club course. This free three-week course… Read More

3 January 2019 · by Nuala McHale

CoderDojo clubs around the world use Scratch both online and offline to enable young people to express themselves, create projects, try new things and learn along with their peers. Scratch has been a vital tool not only in developing creative learning, but in also teaching coding concepts and problem-solving skills. Now Scratch 3.0 has been officially released!    What new updates have been added to Scratch 3.0? This new version expands what, how and where children can create with code. Since the Beta release in August, young people in Dojos have been testing out… Read More

19 December 2018 · by Giustina Mizzoni

It doesn’t quite feel like twelve months have passed since I wrote my 2017 end-of-year blog. Like all years I’ve been involved in CoderDojo, 2018 has been a year of much change and growth across our movement. First things first: we welcomed 660 new Dojos to the community. Now, thanks to the combined efforts of our volunteers, the movement is reaching more than 60000 young people in 110 countries.   Some personal highlights One of my highlights of the year was my visit the Dungarvan Dojo for their fifth birthday celebration in February. Meeting the champions… Read More

19 December 2018 · by Nuala McHale

Whether you’re in Argentina or Antartica – you can keep children and teens busy this holiday season with these fun coded projects! Create snowball throwing or skiing games in Scratch, make animated snow scenes in Blender, code carols to get you in the festive spirit or develop a sensor and alarm project to catch Santa! Scratch 1. Use Scratch to create a skiing game in which you have to avoid randomly appearing obstacles to score points! 2. Make a game in which you have to throw snowballs at… Read More