Creating a space for learning
Bringing CoderDojo to Berlin was easy
Yesterday, I nearly burst into tears addressing a room full of kids, their parents, and the volunteer mentors who gathered for the first CoderDojo in Berlin. From the moment I decided, “I’m going to organize a local CoderDojo,” until the moment I was standing there in front of everyone, I had not stopped to think about how much this meant to me. I managed to express my emotional outburst as laughter.
What is CoderDojo? CoderDojo (coderdojo.com) is an international, loosely defined, volunteer-run club for kids aged 5-17 to socialize and to learn to program for fun. The exact content and frequency is determined by the volunteers in each city who organize the club.
A few weeks ago, a friend asked me if I knew of any clubs suitable for a 13-year-old to learn to code while socializing with other kids. I had heard of exactly such a thing — CoderDojo — but no one in Berlin had ever taken the step from just talking about it to organizing one. I asked around on Twitter if any appropriate club existed locally, and while I got a lot of suggestions of organizations that ran such events, none of them had yet been established locally.
People in the JavaScript community in Berlin have been talking about teaching programming to kids since 2011, when James Whelton presented at JSConf EU about CoderDojo, the organization he had co-founded earlier that year. I was there when James gave that presentation, and I’d wiped away tears then. I can’t explain why this makes me feel as emotionally overwhelmed as it does, even to myself. But that feeling was strong, and yet two years later, what had I done about it?
If you visit the “Start a dojo” section of the CoderDojo site, you are greeted with five simple, short videos. Taken together, they have one message: Starting a local dojo is easy. Anyone can do it. That person is you.
I followed their simple advice. Pick a date, a venue, promote it on Twitter, ask for help.
Exactly one month after deciding to launch CoderDojo in Berlin, there I was standing in front of fifty expectant faces. I don’t speak German very well, and I don’t know very many kids. Yet, in a city where I don’t speak the language nor know many kids, getting all these people to show up turned out to be pretty effortless. German-speaking friends translated the event details and tweets, and friends and friends of friends spread to the word to families.
If creating a space where children and teens can have fun while learning to program sounds like something you wish you were a part of, then I have this one simple message: Starting a local dojo is easy. Anyone can do it. That person is you.
Addendum: I was given the confidence to take this plunge because of the immediate outpouring of support I got from the Berlin coding community. Thank you to: every person who expressed interest in mentoring, everyone who retweeted or shared my announcements, every parent that registered their child, everyone who put up signs, cut veggies, made hot chocolate, lent a laptop, listened patiently, explained concepts, and lastly to all the coders who attended. I could not and would not have done this without you.
