They came …they kicked ass

… and boy did they kick ass!! The Coder Dojo Conference 2013 took place in Drogheda and Slane Castle last weekend and what a whirlwind it was. Friday night in the Brú Bistro in Drogheda was a great kickstarter for the conference.  People shared their experiences and highlights from Coderdojos across the world with MC for the night Stephen Howell keeping it all moving smoothly.  It was great to get a chance to meet people and start the sharing of ideas in such a relaxed environment.

Saturday morning saw the conference move to Slane Castle and I have to say, from the minute I drove into the castle I was blown away! 

Slane Castle

I think I spent most of the day looking up

Above my head!

The juxtaposition of old and new was commented on by many on the day

They say the devil is in the detail and at DojoCon this was so true.  I loved the details like the polystyrene hashtags …

the lanyards which incorporated the conference programme …

and so much more.   Hats off to all in CoderDojo Drogheda and anyone else who was involved in putting together such a great event

Úna Fox was an inspired choice as MC for the day, her relaxed and witty style was perfect.  Rumour has it she has her eye on the Late Late so watch this space!

The conference kicked off with James Whelton, CoderDojo co-founder, followed by entrepreneur, Jerry Kennelly from tweak.com.  It was great to hear James speak about how CoderDojo has developed and the plans for the future.  Jerry gave a thought provoking presentation reminding us of the many strengths us Irish possess, something we seem to have forgotten along the way!

Before lunch Bill Liao, CoderDojo co-founder, was interviewed by Úna.  During the interview Bill spoke about social inclusion and put forward the idea of a handshake rather than a hand out or a hand up.  With a handshake all parties in the transaction benefit which is so much more powerful.

Running throughout the day there were sessions in the Education, Technology and Running a Dojo streams.  In the first session I went to the ‘Girls Initiative’ session with Rebecca Garcia and Karen O’Connell. It’s good to hear about these initiatives to connect with teenage girls, and encourage them into the STEM areas.  Slides on the session can be found here.  In the second session I went to the ‘Just Code’ panel with Catherine Cronin, Jake Enget and Bernard Kirk.

Next up was Mags Amond’s ‘Putting the children first’ session and as always Mags reminded us of the simple things like clarity of message and that there is much to learn in failing.

In the next session I attended David Cuartielles’ session on ‘Hacking Secondary School. The Hardware Way’.  David is a co-founder of the Arduino platform.  We have some Arduino kits in Limerick and my lot are really enjoying working with them so I was interested to hear some more and David didn’t disappoint.  My son would have been delighted with this

… so maybe it’s best he wasn’t there

I sat on a panel with John Looney and Carina Girvan on ‘Re-Inventing Education’ in the final breakout session of the day.  It was an interesting session and one which has really got me thinking so watch this space for a blog post on some of my thoughts.

I really enjoyed the sessions I went to and from what I heard the other sessions were equally enjoyable.

And so we come to the closing keynote and for this I’ll finish as I started.  Kimberley Bryant delivered the closing keynote.  She came … she kicked ass … and boy did she kick ass!!  It’s not easy to take the floor at 6pm after a long and hectic day.  It’s not easy to take the floor after Lord Henry Mountcharles has regaled your audience with tales of his ancestors. It’s not easy to take the floor after Julie Feeney sang ‘Impossibly Beautiful’ in honour of Úna Fox’s birthday.  But that’s exactly what Kimberley did and in her understated, powerful way she blew us all away!  I connected with Kimberley as she spoke about her motivation to  start Black Girls code, she’s a mother who wanted to give her daughter an opportunity to connect with technology in a meaningful way.

My children were the catalyst for my initial interaction with CoderDojo.  We heard Kimberly talk about the ethos of Black Girls Code

This mirrors so much of what is good about CoderDojo.  I’ll leave you with Kimberley’s closing thoughts and hope they provide as much food for thought for you as they did for me.

The Generation Game

Last Friday we went along to ‘The Generation Game’ family fun day in Dell in Limerick.  The event was organised by the Event Management students in LIT in conjunction with the Limerick CoderDojo.  There was lots to see and do on the day as you can see from the photos

Getting started …

Flama Games

Choice of workshops

Busy workshops

Retro Gaming

PacMan cupcakes

Whack a Politician app

Stephen Howell in action

Games Fleadh winners

Not just coding …

Having too much fun

Well done to the Event Management students and Eugene McDonough for organising a great family day.

Breaking Traditions

The Breaking Traditions Online conference took place on Friday 22nd and Saturday 23rd March.  It was an online conference sponsored by Albemarle County Public Schools and the William Glasser Institute – US.  This is the third year of the Breaking Traditions conference.  The aims of the conference are to

1. help create community between the Glasser Quality Schools;
2. share the ideas of Glasser Quality Schools with progressive educators around the globe; and
3. learn from the best practices of educators everywhere.
   

For more background on the conference check out ‘The Story of the Conference’ by the Conference Co-Ordinator Charlotte Wellen.

I love the idea of the conference as it allows people to connect as they can from the comfort of their own homes.  Through Pam Moran I heard of the conference last year and joined some of the sessions.  Pam asked me if I would submit a proposal this year so I agreed and Saturday 23rd March saw me presenting on ‘What can we learn from CoderDojo?’.

The conference kicked off on Friday 22nd March with a keynote presentation from Pam Moran.  What I loved about the keynote presentation was that Pam convened a panel of teachers and students to address the theme of “Emerging Democracy of Voice for Educators and Young People​”.   The ease with which Pam facilitates theses sessions was very evident at the ICT in Education Conference in Thurles last year, and it was lovely to feel that sense of warmth and support come through so clearly at the Breaking Traditions conference this year.   Unfortunately I couldn’t  participate in any of the sessions on the Saturday because of the CoderDojo Divas session in Limerick.  There were many I would have loved to participate in including

• A Creativity Crisis?
  How Do We Make Space
  for the Hackers and the Makers? by Mary Loftus
• Teen Tech Girls Inspiring the Next Generation of Women in Tech by Kim Wilkens
• Building on Solid Foundations of the Past in Meeting the Needs of Young People in the Future by Caitriona Cullen
• Break the Walls Down by Michael Thornton

These are just some of the many sessions that caught my eye on the rich conference programme.

I decided to try out using Prezi Online for my session as I was concerned that playing the interviews remotely would not work well.  It went really well and is definitely worth looking into if you are presenting remotely.  For the content I went with what Eugene McDonough and I used at the ESAI Conference.    Letting the children and one of the Mum’s from the Dojo tell their story seemed like the best way to go.  Hearing the children talk about

• learning from each other or by figuring it out for themselves;
• not being forced to learn;
• animating their favourite books and
• learning by working through complicated things

was so much more powerful than anything I could possibly say.

There were a couple of points in the Mum’s interview that really struck a chord with me and others on the night including the beauty of children using their creativity and learning to make things; 

• how children work with others regardless of age; the sense of community within Coderdojo and the fact that it’s valued that the child knows something which may not always be the case in school.

My Prezi from the session can be found here and a Storify of the session created by Catherine Cronin can be found here.

Coder Dojo Divas

Last Saturday saw the first Coder Dojo Divas event in the Limerick Coder Dojo.  This event was aimed specifically at girls between 12 and 17 to encourage more girls to get involved.  We’ve noticed in Limerick over the past while that, although we have a healthy balance between girls and boys in the younger age group, we have very few older girls involved.  There has been much talk about encouraging girls to get involved in technology, both inside and outside the CoderDojo community.  Rebecca Garcia from the New York Coder Dojo, convened the first Google+ hangout on this topic on the 4th March, the transcript of which can be found here.

To the best of my knowledge, the Limerick Divas event is only the 3rd such type of event in the CoderDojo community.  The New York and Waterford Coder Dojos have already run sessions targeting teenage girls.  It’s great to see female Coder Dojo mentors like Rebecca Garcia, Jennifer Keane and Karen O’Connell taking the lead on such initiatives.  Karen did a fantastic job of getting the ball rolling in the Limerick Dojo.  Her efforts over the past few weeks saw more than 15 girls turn up for the first Divas event.  A few of the girls had been to the Dojo previously but there were many new faces which was great to see.  I loved how Karen gave a context to girls in technology by referring to the programmers of the world’s first all electronic computer who were female. For more information on these female programmers check out eniacprogrammers.org.

Eniac Programmers

Karen then led us in a great session based on App Inventor.  After a bit of time spent getting the set up sorted the girls worked on a crystal ball app.  It was great to see them working alone and together as they worked out technical issues and got their first app working both on an emulator and an Android device.   As groups they also signed up for the Technovation challenge.

I really enjoyed the session on Saturday and look forward to future Divas events in Limerick.

ESAI conference

About 2 months ago Aisling Leavy, a mentor at CoderDojo Limerick, asked me if I’d be interested in submitting a proposal for a symposium at the Educational Studies Association of Ireland Conference with her and some others.   The theme of the symposium was “Teaching children to code”.  Aisling lectures in Mary Immaculate College, a college which offers a wide range of programmes in Education and the Liberal Arts.  She has been involved in a Project where some of her pre service teachers were teaching Scratch to children in a number of local primary schools.  Aisling’s plan was that she would present with her colleague Rory McGann, who was also involved in the project,  Clare McInerney from Lero, the Irish software engineering research centre, would present on their initiatives to get children coding and Eugene McDonough and I would present on our experiences as mentors in the Limerick CoderDojo.  Before I gave myself a chance to think about it I decided to agree.

Eugene and I chatted about how we might structure our presentation and we decided that letting the children tell their owm story was the best way forward so that’s what we did.  We did some interviews with the ninja’s and with one of the mum’s and built our presentation around that.  I really enjoyed presenting with Aisling, Rory, Clare and Eugene.  It was heartening to see so many crossovers in our presentations, which was unplanned, but suggests the beginnings of a synchronicity around coding in Irish education.  We all told of the joy that children find in coding.  My favourite quote from the session was from Rory and Aisling’s presentation where one of the children in their project said something like “the teacher could have been asleep at the top of the class and we wouldn’t have noticed”.

I had never presented in a symposium before but I really liked it.  A symposium is defined in the Oxford Dictionary as “a conference or meeting to discuss a particular subject”.  As a presenter I liked the fact that there was safety in numbers  As a result of this positive experience I’m thinking of convening some symposia at the ICT in Education conference this year.  I think it might encourage some teachers who might be hesitant to share what they do in their classrooms.

As well as our session, I also attended a number of other sessions at the conference.  I really enjoyed the format.  The sessions were generally one and a half hours in duration with a number of themed parallel sessions in each.  Within each session there were 3 or 4 presentations.  The two sessions that I attended on Friday were both very thought provoking.  The ‘Initial Teacher Education’ session examined topics such as the ‘Entry requirements for Initial Teacher Education’ and the challenges for Initial Teacher Education as we adjust to Project Maths.  As a Maths educator I was particularly interested in the session on Project Maths.  Hearing Miriam Liston and Olivia Fitzmaurice, talking about the difficulties that their pre service teachers had, with explaining the foundation knowledge that they would ultimately be teaching, outlined the significant chasm that exists between understanding advanced Maths concepts and being able to teach Maths.  The University of Limerick have introduced a ‘Mathematical thinking’ module which allows their pre service student teachers to focus on key concepts such as logs and indices, fractions, integers, equations and inequalities, formulae, trigonometry and statistics.  One of the students comments “It’s not that it’s hard, it’s just that we’ve never been asked to think before” is very telling in my opinion.  You can read my thoughts on this tension between mathematical ability and the ability to teach Maths in my previous post on this topic.

I also attended the ‘Science and Mathematics Education’ session.  There was a couple of common threads running through many of the presentations – the ideas of communities of practice and inquiry based learning.  These threads were woven through Joanne, Aoibhinn and Maeve’s presentations. With the focus changing at second level to a more application and real world context for subjects like Maths and Science there will be an increased reliance on teachers both within one’s own school and also in the broader educational community.

I also found Úna’s presentation on increasing the percentage of students achieving at the highest levels of Maths very interesting.  Her PhD research involves looking at the correlation between standard test results at Primary School and the progress of those students in their future studies in Maths as they continued through secondary school.  She has found a consistency between the achievement of students at Junior Cert with reference to their Primary school standard test results but this does not carry through to Leaving Cert.  I’m looking forward to hearing more from the ongoing research from those who presented at theses sessions.

This week I’m loving … being a mentor at Coder Dojo

I’ve always enjoyed mentoring at Coder Dojo but I have to say I got such a kick out of mentoring at last Saturday’s Limerick Dojo. Eugene had asked me to have a look at networking Scratch for the advanced Scratch group.  Unfortunately I didn’t get a chance to scope out what was involved before hand so it was a leap into the unknown when I arrived on Saturday.  Luckily we had a great lesson prepared by Michael Madden from the Athenry Dojo to guide us but given that networking wouldn’t be my forte I was a little apprehensive!

It didn’t help that I couldn’t manage to get my laptop to do what it needed to do – I could have done without the Startup Repair in the middle of it all! but actually once I ditched my own laptop the real fun started I had nothing to refer to so relied on the ninjas to drive the session.  We were having some problems with Wifi in the room we were in – we tried a router which wouldn’t work either and we even resorted to trying iPhone hotspots (thanks Barry for all the help trying to get that sorted). The upshot seemed to be that we needed everyone to be on the same network (lots of learning involved there!!) so we moved bag and baggage to a room where the Wifi was working well.  By this stage we were half way into the Dojo and I wondered if we would manage to make it work in the remaining time.

In the next hour and a half I was reminded again of what I get from being a mentor at Coder Dojo.  The 6 teens led the session figuring out among themselves how to get it working.  All that was needed was the occasional nudge to refocus as they got carried away when they got someone else onto the mesh and into the chat  The icing on the cake for me was that one of those teens was a girl and she was really enjoying being involved in it.  I think all of the adults involved enjoyed being part of the learning experience on the day – so much so that some of the parents who really wanted to get away to watch the rugby stayed until we got it working!  Before they left on Saturday the ninjas were chatting about networked games ideas.  I can’t make it to the Dojo next Saturday but I’m really looking forward to getting back the week after to see what they come up with.

We got it working

Coder Dojo Conference

Saturday 13th October saw the first Coder Dojo Conference organised by Eugene from the Limerick Dojo.  This was an opportunity for mentors across Ireland and beyond to get together to share what people are doing across the multitude of Coder Dojos that have exploded across Ireland and the world over the past year.  With so much doom and gloom and recession talk about, it was a breath of fresh air to be in the same room as 150 people who voluntarily give up their free time to ensure that the next generation get an opportunity to learn how to code in a fun way.  The atmosphere at the conference was very relaxed, due in no small way to the comfy couches for the panel to relax on.  It really is amazing how something small like that can have such an impact on how an event works.

The early part of the day was taken up with various discussions about helping with the set up of new Dojos, the running of existing Dojos and looking at how we assess kids across the Dojos.   It was interesting that in the assessment discussion the overwhelming sense seemed to be that we should be careful about rushing headlong into assessing because of the negative connotations around assessment.

What followed after lunch was for me what Coder Dojo is all about – the children and teenagers from some of the Dojos gave demonstrations of what they have been working on.  The variety of the projects and the confidence of the presenters was great to see.  I was certainly very proud of Daragh from the Limerick Dojo as he presented his Scratch project which came second in his category in the National Scratch competition earlier this year.

The day ended with Eugene being presented with his black belt so I’m not sure if we now have to bow to him at the Limerick Dojo!!

What resonated most with me on the day was that it’s OK for Dojos to be different.  It’s great for us to learn from each other but the real strength of the Coderdojo movement is the diversity that you’ll find in the 100+ CoderDojo’s that you’ll find in far flung places across the globe.

I’ll leave you with my favourite picture from the day

For more information on CoderDojo check out coderdojo.com.

Return to Coder Dojo

After a break for the summer the Limerick Coder Dojo begins again next Saturday 8th September.  We’re really looking forward to getting back to Saturday Dojo trips in this house.  It’s almost a year since these Saturday trips began and it’s fair to say that they have changed weekends in our house.  Over the year I’ve also got involved in the Thurles and Nenagh Dojos.  A restart date has yet to be decided for each of these Dojos.

My involvement as a mentor has largely been on the Scratch side so I’ve generally been working with the younger age group.  I love working with them.  Seeing how they go about making their games, and finding their way of achieving what they want to do, is pure gold for me.  I love how they mentor and encourage each other and how they love presenting their work.  If you want to get involved in a Dojo check out the Coder Dojo website to find your local Dojo so you can go along and have a look.

I’m also looking forward to the Coder Dojo conference on the 13th October, a chance to get together with mentors from other Dojos to share what we do and to plan for the future.  The organisers have set up a survey to help get ideas and shape what is discussed at the conference. Have your say here.

Coder Dojo Thurles and the Games Fleadh at LIT Tipperary

The Annual Games Fleadh took place on the Thurles Campus of LIT during the week and what a great couple of days it was for the college.  The place was hoppping for the couple of days with Games studios, college students from 15 different colleges across Ireland and second level and primary students.  The Fleadh kicked off on Wednesday with the competitions for the colleges.  There were 3 competitions – Robocode specifically for 1st year college students and the XNA and Direct X competitions which are open to all.  This year we had 11 colleges for the Robocode competition from the length and breadth of the country.  The competition was won by Dundalk Institute of Technology for the second year running, the only college to have retained their title.  Queens University Belfast won the XNA Challenge and LIT Tipperary won the Direct X Challenge.  You can check the other results here.  Wednesday afternoon saw the Games Pro talks with a full schedule of presenters from studios such as Bioware, Havok, Pop Cap, Open Emotion etc. Wednesday night saw the inaugural Irish Games Awards with Ninjamurai from Open Emotion Studios taking the Best Game Award.  More award winners here.

On Thursday the focus shifted from competition to Expo with second level students coming in to hear career talks from speakers such as James Sadlier, from NeverMind Games, and James Whelton, co-founder of the CoderDojo movement.  They also got a chance to have a look at some of the entries for the XNA and Direct X competitions from the previous day.  I even got a couple of extra students in my Maths class on Thursday when a couple of girls stumbled across my class.  We were working through differentiation of Trigonometric functions and I invited the girls to come and join us.  There then followed a half an hour of talking about sine and cosine waves, amplitude, frequency and how the derivative shows how the functions are changing.

The Games Fleadh was nicely rounded off this year with the launch of the Thurles Coder Dojo.  4 o’clock saw James Whelton welcome the more than 100 teens and pre teens who had come along to learn how to code.  The group was split into those who wanted to learn how to create websites using HTML and those who wanted to learn how to make their own games and animations using Scratch.  It  was great to see so many come along to learn how to create their own content.

This is the 9th year of the Games Fleadh in Thurles and I think it was the best yet.  Over the couple of days it was great to see our students, and those from other colleges, getting an opportunity to talk to the people who work in or have set up their own games studios, to showcase the games that they have worked on and to just generally be a part of such a great event.  It was also heartening to see so many second level students attending the Expo this year, as this will go some way towards helping them to make a more informed choice when it comes to their college course choice for the CAO.  Of course we were also delighted to have so many come along for the first Thurles Coder Dojo.  I’ve heard back from a few people that the kids who came along seem to have enjoyed it, so here’s hoping we’ll have a good crew at the second Dojo this Thursday.  You can book your place here.

Back to Coder Dojo

Coder Dojo Limerick returned last Saturday 21st January but unfortunately we couldn’t make it so we went back yesterday.  I had followed the tweets from @CoderDojoLim and various mentors last week so I knew that the numbers were up, with 54 attending last week.  I was curious to see if that was just a one off or if the interest would continue this week.  I got to the Downtown Centre for about half 11 and and from 20 to 12 they just kept coming.  We ended up with 61 kids in total and lots of parents too.  It was great to see the parents staying and helping out as needed, and learning themselves along the way.

We had 3 rooms yesterday – two Scratch rooms and a Robocode room.  The new recruits were taken through the basics of Scratch and those returning worked through their own ideas for projects.   It was great to see that many of those who were working on Scratch before Christmas, have now progressed into the senior room coding in Java for Robocode (http://robocode.sourceforge.net/).  Using Scratch as a stepping stone seems to work, particularly for the younger kids, as it gets them comfortable  with programming concepts in a very graphical way which gives them the confidence to progress to programming languages such as Java.  The atmosphere at Coder Dojo is very relaxed and it was great to see all 3 rooms totally engrossed in what they were doing and having fun in the process.  We’re back to Coder Dojo next week and we’re all looking forward to it already.

Coder Dojo’s are springing up in lots of  locations both in Ireland and further afield, so if you’re interested in Coder Dojo, either to attend or to help out check out http://coderdojo.com/.