Rebooting Scratch in 2015 – Teachers Wanted
Michael has been an amazing Scratch Room leader for 2014 and created a highly popular curriculum. For 2015 we’re going to be starting the Scratch curriculum from the beginning, and Michael thought it would be a great opportunity for some new faces to get front-of-room experience, using his curriculum. If you’d like to lead the Scratch Room for a week or a selection of weeks in 2015, talk to Michael or Greg.
If your child has been in the Scratch room all year, this is a great time to give them a push into developing web and mobile apps with HTML5 and JavaScript. The Khan Academy intro to JavaScript that we’ll be offering at Hour of Code is a great way for them to get started.
Hour of Code is Upon Us
If you haven’t signed up for your Hour of Code tickets, there were 17 left at 7 a.m. this morning. There are NO walk-ins for this event. Volunteers and everyone must be signed up by Thursday.
Check out our Hour of Code page
The Hour of Code uses one-hour tutorials from Code.org and their partners–like Khan Academy and Microsoft–to give kids of all ages one hour of Computer Science education. We will be supporting a selection of 5 one-hour tutorials, ranging from very beginner to intermediate. The list will go out to our Hour of Code volunteers tonight.
Remember, this is in the Arizona building at 207 Boren, not Van Vorst.
We’ll Be Back
You probably saw our notice last week that Amazon confirmed hosting for every Saturday we requested in 2015. We’ll be back with our first CoderDojo on January 10, 2015 in the Wainwright building. Tickets will become available on December 29th.
On A Personal Note
In November of 2013, we were seeing just a handful of kids show up and were wondering if this was going to last. This November, wow. Despite offering 115 tickets, we had waiting lists.
It has been a rich and rewarding experience, bringing CoderDojo to Seattle. People regularly come up and thank me for doing this, but it’s really our volunteers who make it happen. I just do my best to bring you all together. My sincerest thanks go out to all our volunteers for making this an event you want to bring your children to.
And I believe I speak on behalf of all the volunteers when I thank all of our CoderDojo families for coming each Saturday and for helping to create such a fun and positive vibe.
Last I need to thank some organizations:
Thank you to Amazon.com for hosting us and helping us grow.
Thank you to DigiPen and the City of Bellevue for hosting our fall events on the Eastside.
Thanks to GeekGirlCon, Seattle Mini Maker Faire, and Pacific Science Center for helping expose our group to the community with booths at your events.
Thanks to our spring “Tour of Seattle” hosts: the Museum of Flight, the Living Computer Museum, and Microsoft.
Thank you to Wimmer Solutions for 13 loaner laptops, those cool clear stickers, and helping to staff our Mini Maker Faire booth.
Thank you to Codestarter.org and their donors for donating 25 laptops (20 distributed, 5 to go) to Seattle CoderDojo kids who needed a laptop of their own.
And thank you to Urban Sparks for partnering with us in this venture and providing the fiscal sponsorship that makes it possible for us to receive tax-deductible donations.
It’s been an great 2014 and I look forward to 2015. Thank you all so much.
— Greg