January 9th Tickets
We know most of you are just reading this for the ticket links…
GET YOUR REGULAR DOJO TICKETS FOR 1/9
We’ll have our Scratch, Code.org, and Independent Study rooms. We’re trying ticketing each room separately this session as an experiment. If it is terrible, we’ll go back to the old way.
MAKING GAMES WITH PYTHON – 6 WEEK WORKSHOP TICKETS
We’ll explore the book Invent Your Own Computer Games With Python. You can buy it from Amazon or download a PDF for free (it’s Creative Commons licensed). This will require installing Python 3 on your (or your child’s) laptop. While we’ll try to get a couple of loaners set up with Python, we may not have any the first week.
Greg is leading the workshop, but will be trying to stay one step ahead of the kids as he’s a Python n00b. If you’ve got Python experience, feel free to volunteer to help.
Is Your Child Interested in I.T.?
Mentor Hawey has offered to teach a small group of kids about system administration and maintenance. Rather than work on projects in one of the workshop rooms, they’ll help him maintain our small fleet of loaner laptops and learn about stuff like operating systems, networking, and shell scripting. Sign up for the Independent Study room, but arrive early and report to the rec room.
Upcoming Workshops
Greg and Unmesh are planning workshops in Minecraft Modding and 3D Graphics (with OpenGL) for March right now. Neither is locked down, but that’s the plan for the moment. We’re also talking to a 3rd party about coming in and running a Web Design workshop for a few sessions.
Remember, we’re volunteer powered. When Greg wanted to take his son to a CoderDojo in Seattle, but there wasn’t one, he started one. If there’s a workshop you want us to run, but we’re not, volunteer to teach it. It can be as short as 1 session, as long as 6. Pitch your idea to info@seattlecoderdojo.com.
What Happened To The Site?
Many of you were expecting this on Monday, and when it didn’t come, you may have gone to the site and found it down. Long story short, the company that hosts the server we were on went into a massive failure that took hundreds or possibly thousands of web sites offline for 4-6 days.
Setting up automated nightly backups on a 3rd party storage service is always one of those things you know you should do, and you’ll get around to it one of these days… Trust us. Get around to it now. You don’t want to be looking at 4-month old back-ups on your laptop, your server is down, and you have no time to rebuild everything from the last 3 months using Archive.org as a guide.
Look on Twitter for @asmallorange or at all the visitor comments on the FaceBook page for A Small Orange if you’re interested in more stories of all the customers who are massively upset with them.