Finishing up Curtin CoderDojo 2023

Everyone has the ability to code and create amazing things with technology. It's one of my mission statements, and one of the ways I live this belief is by volunteering with the Curtin CoderDojo. I'm one of 3 champions who run the dojo for kids aged 12-17 to learn and get excited about coding.

This was my first year championing the dojo, and of course, that came with some challenges. I was fortunate that Leigh and Gabriel were fantastic about organising student resources and keeping on top of the paperwork. I led the mentors and energised our sessions more.

Previously, I found a group of students I could convince to be interested in some activity we could all work on. I'd show them the basics and then help them implement whatever fun ideas they wanted to add on top of them. As a champion, this is more challenging; I had other mentors looking towards me for direction and assistance.

I couldn't dedicate as much individual time to the students as before. However, this led to a good learning experience for me; instead of assuming where the students were at, I tried to push them further to see how much support they needed. This is great for the students as they learn skills they can take home and replicate for any idea they have. All coding tools have documentation; once you learn how to access and read them, the world is your oyster. So anytime I needed to step away, I would indicate what in the documents was next and an example of the code, and once I was able to return to them, I'd check on them and their understanding of what they had implemented. This worked well, and I got two students to progress on two different projects quickly.

My other major challenge was introducing new mentors to the CoderDojo. This came naturally because I had a lot of experience teaching others and working with kids, so I assumed they would be as comfortable jumping in as I did my first week. To tackle this, we had weekly wind-down sessions to discuss what went well and what could be improved, which opened up this opportunity to improve. As a group, we helped train each other about being better mentors. Tips and tricks that worked for each of us could be trialled, and people worked out what worked best for them. We were also able to help build our discord community from being a place where only we posted updates to a place where the students were starting to interact with each other, and it's really starting to feel like a community now.

I have so many ideas on how to make CoderDojo a more fun place to be, so I will write an action plan this summer to help teach students to be more independent with their learning and also try to grow our group to even bigger heights.