April 4th Tickets Now Available
You’ll notice on the order form there’s also a space for an optional financial gift this week. Small gifts like these help us pay for smaller things like name tags and markers, the pies we put out on Pi Day, volunteer appreciation events, etc.
Unlike public radio where you get barraged with long pledge breaks for a week or more, we don’t ask often and we keep it short. Please help.
Get your April 4th Tickets Now (and please make a small non-deductible gift if you can).
To make a tax-deductible gift of over $20, please visit this link.
What Is The Nodeschool Study Group for Parents?
NodeSchool is a learning platform, powered by node.js, where you can learn JavaScript programming at your own pace. The lessons have a text-based introduction, links to docs where you can find more information, and a programming challenge. You complete the challenge by writing code and running a command to have it validated.
There won’t be any instructors at the whiteboard going over concepts, no lessons. We’ll have an intro session to get parents who haven’t set up Nodeschool yet started, but then you go through the lessons at your leisure. If you get stuck, we’ll try to have a mentor in the room and we hope parents will help each other.
If you want to go sit with your child for a bit, need to use the restroom, or have to take a call, you won’t fall behind, because it’s at your own pace. It’s not a class, just a communal environment where you can teach yourself and get some help if you get stuck.
The NodeSchool Study Group will be in the conference room off the kitchenette, starting on April 4. If you’re at CoderDojo with your child, feel free to drop in.
What’s Our Next Sequence?
Mentor Chris will be running his Beginner Python workshop for the four Saturdays of April in the room where we’ve been running Minecraft. What do we do for the 4 weeks of May? We’ve put up some ideas in a poll on the Seattle CoderDojo Facebook group. You can vote for one of those or suggest something else.
To avoid being overrun by spammers, we do require you to request membership in the group, but it’s not like you have to jump through a lot of hoops. You go to the group page on Facebook and request membership. As long as you’re not “on Facebook for less than 1 month, member of 400 groups,” Greg will usually approve you within a few hours. Then you can post, comment, and vote.
If you have an opinion about what workshop we should run in May, please let us know.
JavaScript Reboot: April 4
Remember that Jonathan will be rebooting the JavaScript room on April 4th, starting with basic concepts again. If your child has sort of reached their limit in the Scratch room, this will be a perfect time to move them up to JavaScript.