It was started in Ireland (in Cork to be more specific) by James Whelton and Bill Liao. There are now 22 countries listed as having CoderDojo clubs.
My daughter started to attend the local club in Malahide late last year and she really enjoys it.
They start people off learning "Scratch" which is a really cool language for developing games, animations, etc. I will return to Scratch in future postings.
A few weeks ago I signed up as a mentor.
In my first class there were 40 kids in the Scratch groups (I counted them!). They were others in other groups (e.g. learning website development).
All of the kids (ages from 8 to 17 in theory but most of them were towards the lower end of that range) sat down at tables and took out their laptops. The parents stayed with the younger kids.
I had never stayed for a class before and wasn't entirely sure what the expect. How could 2 mentors cope with 40 kids for 2 hours?!
But the truth is that most of the kids just worked away independently for the 2 hours. They seemed completely happy.
So the great things are:
1) It's great to see kids developing games rather than just playing them!
2) It's nice to think that we are encouraging the software developers of the future.
If you want to start your own club then take a look here.
