Back in December 2012, Steven Flower started the first CoderDojo at MadLab Manchester. Being a software developer myself, I took along my 8 year old daughter to find out how to teach her to code. There were around 20 youngsters with a mix of knowledge and skills. After just a few months we outgrew the… Continue reading
Blog
New Beginning
After 9 years of meeting at The Sharp Project, we can now announce that Manchester CoderDojo will be held in a new venue! We are partnering up with Ada, the National College for Digital Skills and holding our sessions at their Manchester tech hub. This is at Manchester Technology Centre at Oxford Road. We are… Continue reading
Three years!
We celebrated three years of Manchester CoderDojo in December 2015. So – we took our “traditionally” photo, which sits alongside our previous two. See if you can spot yourself!
How I won my first ever hackathon!
As part of our preparation for Hack Manchester Jnr, we had a kind offer of help from Michelle Hua to tell her story..! When I first heard about hackathons, I was curious and intrigued to find out what they were. All I knew was it is 2 days of challenges in teams and presentations to… Continue reading
Top 5 Tips for HackManchester Jnr
The countdown has begun to HackManchester Jnr which is taking place at the amazing Museum of Science & Industry. It’s a 2 day event which right now, before the start, seems like plenty of time, but once the first day starts and the excitement and energy is turned up to 11, the time will go… Continue reading
Countdown to HackManchester Jnr…
It’s less than two weeks to the very first Hack Manchester Jnr – we’re very excited! To date, over 80 nearly 100 “young coders” have registered for this two-day event, backed up with a large team of volunteers, supporters and sponsors. So, whether you’re registered or just thinking about it, we wanted to start the… Continue reading
Using AppMaker to create simple Apps
A number of us from Manchester CoderDojo were fortunate to visit the annual Mozilla Festival held in London in October. One of the sessions introduced AppMaker a free open source tool which allows simple Apps to be developed very simply. At CoderDojo #18, an enthusiastic audience were able to quickly develop a simple dice rolling… Continue reading
Resources to help learn the basics of Coding
There are numerous tools and applications to help you get started with coding. At CoderDojo we frequently use Scratch and Python as these are often used in the classroom. However there are many other choices which can also be used to experience the fun or coding. Here is a small selection of applications which might be useful. IPAD… Continue reading
Coding for Kids: iPads, iPhones, iPods (part 1)
iPads are kid magnets. Why not take advantage of the animal magnetism of your iPad to teach some coding instead of tapping Smurf, Simpsons or FarmVille characters? There are some great apps that teach real programming skills out there, while making it fun and inviting. Dust off your old Kindle – the kids are going to requisition your… Continue reading
CoderDojo Bolton need electronics volunteers!
CoderDojo Bolton starts again today, so we asked organiser Nour about their plans and requests. —————– After a great start on the 15th of march there was a lot of interest from the attendees and great help from the mentors and Clix. At the sessions we covered HTML/CSS, php, python. Some made games using Kodu,… Continue reading
Scratch, Python and Google Apps Script
At today’s Manchester CoderDojo at The Sharp Project, we embarked upon our three-month (three-meetup) project to try and build the “World’s Largest CoderDojo Rube Goldberg Machine”. This is a machine that is part-physical, part-virtual, and is all about connecting up real and online things to build a chain of events that span the physical and… Continue reading
Introducing Pure Data
We’re always keen to look at new and interesting stuff at Manchester CoderDojo. Dave takes us through one… Pure Data is a visual programming language, using wiring as a way to programme. It excels at working with audio, MIDI, and can handle cameras, 3d graphics, and network connectivity as well. It is free and open… Continue reading
Guest Post: Robotiky
On March 9th Manchester CoderDojo will be trying out the software behind Robotiky using its built in online Simulator! Robotiky is a small robot who, with the help of online tutorials and games, teaches programming and problem solving skills. Starting off with drag and drop exercises and smoothly transitioning within the same environment to text… Continue reading
Learning to code and build the Web: there’s never been a better time!
As a local community member (and a Mozilla tech writer) I am really interested in teaching web development and coding principles to anyone who is interested! To this end I have created two courses: It’s my web!: A ten week course to teach the basics of web design (source available on Github.) This course covers… Continue reading
Underwater Scratch
This month’s event at the Sharp Project was a great success, not least because of the superb space that we are able to use. As well as the huge ground floor area (known as “The Campus”) we have the facility to use a large self-contained room upstairs (“Gold 150”) which has a big screen and… Continue reading
Jingle Tangerines!
At the December Manchester CoderDojo, we had a session with Scratch, a MaKey MaKey and some tangerines. It was a game that we first played, then picked apart to understand how it worked, learning some Scratch coding (and some fundamental computational concepts) at the same time. The idea was that the player had to play… Continue reading
