Seattle CoderDojo is Rebuilding in 2023
We have been away for nearly three years due to the pandemic. We have to find new locations, new volunteers, get the word out to new families. As our chapter’s founder says: “running events is like running races. We have to train ourselves back to the level at which we used to perform. After this long a break, we’ll potentially hurt ourselves trying to go too big too fast.”
Q: How often do you meet and when’s the next meetup?
That is TBD. We’re shooting for a first meetup of 2023 sometime in April, monthly through the summer, and then to twice a month September – November and an Hour of Code event in December. Depending on how that goes, we’ll consider a higher frequency for 2024. It all depends on our ability to recruit host sites and volunteers, and the amount of time our leadership can spend managing that.
Please remember, we are volunteer-run from top to bottom. We have no employees and pay no salaries. We depend on hosts (companies or institutions who provide free space for us to meet) and volunteers to do everything we do.
Q: Where do you meet?
That is TBD. We are looking for host sites who can accommodate us on Saturday mornings with room for at least 15 kids to sit at tables where they can plug in laptops, plus room for their parents to mill around. We’re open to bigger spaces, but 15 kids in the minimum and 30 will be the maximum for the time being.
Yes, 15-30 kids is a far cry from the 305 we hosted for the Hour of Code in 2018 at Amazon. Being able to handle three hundred kids took us 64 months to reach. We’ll be able to get there faster this time around, but we can’t start there.
We maintain a $1 million event liability policy and professional liability insurance, so we can add our hosts as a named insured if they need.
Q: What will you teach
Also TBD.
In “the old days” we would run 4 classrooms with cycling topics and try to have one multi-session project going on.
In our reboot/rebuild, we’ll have one space, one project, and a strongly suggested age range and experience level based on the project. We will not be able to accommodate every skill level at every meetup in 2023.
Q: Is this a class
CoderDojo is a club, not a class. We hold club meetups where we do STEAM learning activities.
We don’t have venture capital renting us a retail space where we’re scrambling to bring in enough kids to keep our investors happy. Our Dojo families and Dojo volunteers are our club members and while we answer to them, we’re also only as strong as their support allows.