 I want to say that I am not a coder, and this is important for a couple of reasons, one of those reasons is that I will probably make technical mistakes in this talk that will be completely because there are so much that's over my head, you will have to forgive me for those. The second reason I say it is a more important reason, this talk is called how I set up a coder dojo. This is not an I story, this is a we story, a bunch of people, several of whom are in this tent now. Very much were behind this thing, this would not have happened without those people. The story I'll talk about how it began and just tell you the anecdotes, tell you some of the things that went well, some of the things that went badly, some of the challenges we faced, but as I say I am not a coder myself. I'm a lawyer, and I can riff for ages if you want me to on the similarities between law and coding. I'm a contracts lawyer and contract drafting and drafting coder, not a million miles apart. We've got a lot of similarities. We have a load of impenetrable jargon for a start. We have a lot of if then statements and else cases. We have variables, we call them definitions but they're pretty much the same thing. I was thinking about this in the night and thought maybe even the laws of England and Wales are an operating system but then I thought I'd probably overextended my metaphor and I should stop now. But more relevantly than being a lawyer for these purposes, the purposes of this story, come on, what's the matter, I'm going to do that, drafting that. I'm also a mother and at the time this story starts in 2015 I was a mother of three children who were 12, 10 and 8. The 12-year-old had just gone into gaming and was very much looking at that end of computing but was not in any way interested in what was going on beneath the hood. The technologist in our blended family is my partner Randall who's also in this room. At the time in 2015 we'd been together about a year and if I tell you that it had been quite a ride, a few weeks into our relationship he just took me away, whisked me away for a romantic weekend and brought me to EMF. So you can tell that it was the kind of journey that I'm on at the beginning of this story. And Randall thought that this 12-year-old who was gaming perhaps could do with understanding a little bit more about what was going on with computing and just wondering how to encourage him to do that. At the time I'm living in a town called Olney. If you draw a triangle on the map with Milton Keynes, Bedford and Northampton at the corners, Olney is pretty much right in the middle of that triangle. It's a tiny little market town, about 6,000 people on the electoral roll. It regards itself as very famous for an annual pancake race, which features on Blue Peter regularly, and for being the place where the him Amazing Grace was written. So not a lot going on in Olney, I think it is fair to say. Not a lively place. In 2015, Salesforce began a partnership with Codedojo, and at the Salesforce conference that year, which was attended by Randall, Mary Maloney, who was the CEO of the Codedojo Foundation at the time, came and gave a talk about Codedojo, what they were trying to achieve. It's a fairly infant organisation at that time being run out of Ireland, but setting up all over the world. And Randall came back and went, this might be the thing. This might be how we get this boy interested in computers. Why don't we think about setting up a Codedojo in the town? Now I know nothing about coding, but I am pretty good at getting things organised and getting stuff to happen. So, away we went. Codedojo's website is very helpful. It sets up this easy process for how to form a Codedojo. As you will find in the next few slides, it's not as simple as this. Register as a champion is the easy bit. You go online, you register. Then find a public venue, okay? Obviously find a free public venue because you can't charge. Codedojo isn't allowed to charge the participants any money at all to take part. The idea is that money should not be a barrier to being able to participate in this. So finding a public venue is a challenge when you've not got any obvious money to fund it. Then start, which I just think is a splendid idea. Well, I'm not a coder. One person who knows anything about technology can't run one of these things on their own. So the first thing we had to do was find some interested people who might be interested in guiding the kids of the town into a coding hobby. Advertised on the local Facebook group, advertised in the local sort of free sheet magazine that goes around everybody's doors. Believe it or not, and I really didn't believe it, I couldn't believe it, quite a few people responded. Quite a few people in the town with coding experience, coding careers contacted me and said, yeah, quite interested in getting involved in this. None of these people really knew each other, even though it's a very small town they hadn't met. They didn't know each other. If you want to do, I don't know, McCrame, there's probably a club for you in Olney. But if you certainly, as we will discover, if you want to do flower-ranging or gardening, there's a club for you in Olney, but nothing if you're interested in tech, if you're interested in coding. And so these people, group, Belgium people, several of them in the room now, were excited by this. And one Tuesday evening in July, we got together in the pub, as every good group always begins in the pub. And had a chat, worked out what kind of things we thought we might be able to do, and then sort of move forward with some of those plans. We found a venue. This is a community centre in the town. It used to be a primary school, so it's got really good rooms in it. It's got sort of classroom-sized spaces, which are handy for this kind of thing. It's not free, unfortunately, but we managed to get a slightly subsidised rate. We had just installed Superfast Broadband. They were excited about the fact that it was now going to get proper use. So that was where we planned to get going. Start, as I said, was not really enough of a description of what is required. This was a council building. In order to run a children's organisation in a council building, the council requires you to jump through an awful lot of hoops. You have to register with the local authority. You needed insurance. You needed a safeguarding policy. Every adult who is involved should have a DBS check. We needed rules. We needed parental consents and waivers. There's quite a lot of admin, actually, and some of that is costly admin. You pay for DBS checks. The council was able to subsidise that for us. You have to pay for the insurance, and, as I said, you have to pay for the room house. So that was a little bit of a hurdle to begin with. The other thing we thought was, well, do we need any kit to do this? So we bought a few bits of kit. We bought a little router so that we could extend the Wi-Fi into the classroom that we were using. We bought power packs because you can just imagine how many kids are going to turn up with nothing left on the battery. The number of them who turned up not having ever switched on a computer for a week and had to spend the first half doing all the Windows updates was a fairly major issue as well. We bought some crocodile clips because why not? We bought various bits of kit. But money. I will come onto this. Coda Dojo pushed the idea that you should seek sponsorship for your club, local businesses, local organisations, councils, if they will subsidise it. We did manage eventually to get some sponsorship from the Mercedes Formula One team because where we are, the number of people in one of our mentors was a coda for the Mercedes Formula One team. So they sponsored us to some extent. One of the local estate agents chipped in and paid the insurance. To be honest, we personally bankrolled a fair bit of it as well. We paid the rent on the room every week ourselves. So not ideal. That is a completely get why Coda Dojo won't let you charge and why it's important that anyone should have access. But it is a problem I think for the organisation more generally. And in fact there are commercial kind of competitors around something called Code Ninjas, which is a very, very similar organisation. But they charge. It's more of a franchise operation. Anyway, so we've got everything. We've got our infrastructure set up. We've got all our admin done. We've got our venue. We've got our power packs. Now we just need some kids. So back to the only notice board and the only magazine recruiting a bunch of kids. Within a couple of weeks, we had filled all 25 of our spaces. We had a waiting list of perhaps another 10. And we were getting emails daily from people who were interested who wanted to come along. The demand for this and the interest in this among the kids in the town and among their parents was absolutely huge. And it really surprising just how much demand there was when we got going. And then in September 2015, as it happened in National Coding Week, I didn't even know this until afterwards, but it was National Coding Week. It was the week we opened our doors and we started. 25 kids turned up. We began and this had been how we decided back in that meeting in the pub. We would started off with a number of different sort of zones or offers. We started off with a robotics sort of department as you were talking about, or rotation. A website building one, an Android app one. And a scratch, which is, you'll all know scratch, a very, very handy entry level coding package for especially younger children, really, really good. We began thinking that what we would do is put people into each of these kind of rotations for four or six weeks at a time and then move them on to the next thing. We were meeting weekly for an hour and a half in the evenings. It very quickly became apparent that the kids were just starting to get to grips with the thing that they were doing and we were making the move on to the next thing. So we scrapped that in the end and gave people more of an opportunity to just kind of choose something and stick with it until they'd really achieved something. That was one of our major learning experiences. I'm showing you this picture. This is one of the little robots that the robotics team was developing and I like to think of this robot as a sort of embryo of Jeff because if anyone has seen Jeff around the place, you may have been to the talk a couple of days ago about Jeff, the fabulous robot and almost South African nurse. Well, this was one of the robots at the same sort of time as Jeff was being built. This was being used in the Code of Dojo by Jeff's creator. We found that although there are loads of really good coding resources online, when kids don't have two screens and we did not have room or indeed the resources to provide two screens, if they're copying code or using code that they found online, they can't also be working on their own code at the same time. And this proved a problem and we found that books were a really good way of kind of getting around that. And this book, believe it or not, Carol Vorderman was our saviour. This was a cracking book. I think it's probably been superseded by now. But this was a really, really great book to start off. I had lots of really simple scratch and Python programs in it and kids were really able to access it. It was a great place to start. And in fact, I think a lot of primary schools were using this at the same sort of time. One of the things that we found worked quite well was to kind of set a group challenge, but the different levels of the different ability levels could access that challenge in different ways. So we decided over a number of weeks to set people the challenge of coding a game. And the games that we chose were player cards, right? So that's a sort of a higher or lower game. I'm guessing is the next card going to be higher or lower than the one that you've got now? Snakes and ladders. And some people were trying to code the ladders and the snakes themselves. Some people were just coding the dice, which was just a random number generator effectively. Top trumps where kids could choose their own subjects, so it might have been sport or farm animals or princesses or whatever it was. So different challenges that they were able to access in different ways. And it's just a picture of everybody at work. As you can see, kids all sitting in a sort of a horseshoe and mentors putting their backs out, leaning over them, trying to help them with the code that they're working on. When we began, because I'm not great with names, 25 kids in a room, all of them sort of in the same school uniform half the time, I didn't know how we were going to identify them. So I gave them all stickers with their names on and they were all wearing these stickers. And I realised that I couldn't see the stickers. So from about week two onwards, I just put the stickers on their backs. And that way, we knew exactly who we were talking to because we were leaning over them the whole time. Sometimes the flu or a school trip slightly depleted and we ended up with a ratio of more than one mentor per kid, which was good for them, I guess. Where on is, as I said, not very far from Milton Keynes and therefore Bletchley, a few months in, we decided it would be a really nice thing to organise a weekend trip to the National Computing Museum at Brechtly. So we went along, loads of the kids and their parents came. We did a bit of a tour. In fact, we got them to open the museum before opening hours and give us a private tour because there was such a lot of us, which is absolutely brilliant. And then, of course, they all got into the arcade and played on the old spectrums and what have you, BBC micros, that they've got there playing various games, which is great. So I said I'd talk about some of the challenges that we faced. One of them, I mentioned, if you're a gardener or a flower arranger, there are clubs in only for you. Unfortunately, those clubs meet in the same venue on the same evening as Coda Dojo. And the room that we had at that time didn't have doors. It had a kind of a curtain that pulled across. So quite quickly, we had gardeners and flower arrangers on different evenings coming and complaining that the children were making too much noise and that they couldn't hear their speaker. And could we keep the children from talking? Please. One of them was a former teacher and she said there's absolutely no reason for children to talk while they're learning. Children should just learn silently. Right, okay. I was summoned to... They had some letters of complaint at the venue and I was summoned to meet the chair of the premises committee of the local council which was in charge of this building. And I turned up and they'd had these two letters. They'd had a letter of complaint from the chair of the flower arranging club and a letter of complaint from the chair of the gardening club. And so I was quite, you know, this is two letters. It's quite serious. So I go along to this meeting. The first thing is that the chair of the premises committee turns out to be a leading person in the local Labour party and I had been on the campaign trail with her not a few months before so that was quite amusing and that she immediately recognised me and was on our side. Also they were keen, they really were keen on this club. But then it transpired that the president of the flower arranging club and the president of the gardening club were married to each other. You can just imagine they're sitting there on the sofa in front of the fire working themselves up into a tiz and both sitting there with their typewriter writing their letter. Anyway, we were allowed to continue to run the club. They were asked to... We obviously tried to keep the noise down and within a year or so they had put proper doors onto the room so that noise was relatively contained. I did have a marvellous... They always came in and complained that we were disturbing their speakers I'll tell you about the show and tells we used to do but we were having our end of term show and tell just before Christmas and they were having their Christmas party and I had to go out and say could they possibly keep the noise down because they were disturbing our presentation. The other challenge we had because the club is free is that there were kids coming along who, to be honest, weren't that keen and it was seven to eight thirty on a Tuesday night great opportunity for parents to go to the gym or the supermarket or basically just put their feet up for an hour and a half because they're not paying, the fact that their kids aren't that keen was not a deterrent. It became a real issue, there were kids who were just wasting time messing about, not really getting it and we had this massive waiting list, we had all these other kids who we knew wanted to come and we just had kids who weren't concentrating so one evening after the session in the pub the other mentors all unanimously agreed that we should definitely sack some of these children, ask some of these children to depart and they also unanimously agreed that the person who should do that was me. So I get to phone up or email the various parents and explain that we think that we've probably taken their child as far as they can go and perhaps they might like to think of a different hobby. That was a bit interesting. In 2016 the microbit arrived. That was something that was supposed to have been handed to I think year 7 children, first year of secondary, at the beginning of the year but for various reasons had not been able to be released until about June or July of the academic year so obviously everybody's into sports days and school trips and nobody is thinking of launching a new competing curriculum in July. So kids were given these things and they went home with them and put them in a drawer and they never got used to it, it was a real sadness and certainly in our local schools but we got hold of a few of these things and they are terrific, I know if anyone has used them but they are absolutely amazing little devices. They have got a significant number of sensors on them so they've got an accelerometer, they've got a magnetometer they've got a photometer, thermometer all sorts of really really useful inputs which are fantastic fun for kids to use to code and the other thing that was really brilliant for the kids in our club was that whereas Scratch is the block building language and then you can use a text-based language like Python or whatever the micro bit enabled you to toggle between the two so you could build your code in the blocks in a very scratch kind of way and then you could toggle across and see the same code the underlying code in TypeScript so that the kids were able to see what they created and maybe change something in the text code and then go back and see how that changed the block code it was a really really good bridge for certain children who'd reached a kind of ceiling with the Scratch stuff but were able now to move on from there and we used to have an initiation where I would get them in and they would code a compass using the magnetometer inputs they would code this from the micro bit website and then having got the principles of the very simple programme I would ask them if they could now code me a thermometer which would print on the screen, you know, hot, warm, cold depending on the temperature that it reached and once they'd got their code satisfactory and this is, I'm not a coder right but I'm now leading this flaming thermometer project for every kid who arrives through the door but we used to have this kind of graduation ceremony where we would go to the freezer in the kitchen of this venue and we would wrap the micro bit in cling film and pop it in the freezer and then they would watch the screen go down to cold when they got to 2 degrees, it was brilliant they loved it, a real sort of sense that they'd achieved something we used to end each term with a show and tell so people would bring along or would demonstrate what they'd been working on sometimes they would show us a piece of hardware this is the robot again with one of our members showing how he's coded it, what he's coded it to do sometimes we would put their code blocks or text up on a screen we'd project it up onto the screen and people would talk us through what they'd done in 2016, Randall and I brought a pop-up coder dojo to EMF and ran one in one of the children's tents which was challenging for two people because quite a lot of people, you've got to remember that the kids who come to EMF are probably a bit advanced on the kids who come to dojo do so that was kind of scary one summer for our sort of end of year summer party we had a retro games night and brought all kinds of all the mentors who have stuff in their lofts and brought along all the different games that they already had or indeed here we have a pong on an oscilloscope coded by one of the members which was brought along for people to play with as well also at the end of each term mentors curry, rude not to and then in 2018 we came, a group of the mentors came along to EMF for the first time bringing the joy, the wonderful Jeff in his earlier incarnation as I said in the blurb about this talk I said that the things that I'm most excited about what we achieved in a way that the mentors turned up to run a club and ended up being long standing friends and there's five or six of us here today all come today to EMF this year as well as part of a friendship group as much as anything else the other thing that I'm very proud of what we achieved is that some of the kids who started off in 2015 as 12 year olds stayed with the club all the way through went on to become more senior people and doing much more advanced stuff and eventually, and this is the third picture in this slide went on to be mentors so this picture shows the same two kids Sam and Josh once when they were about 12 or 13 once when they were about 15 or 16 and then standing up and putting their own backs out leaning over the next generation of kids in the club and actually Sam is my 12 year old son he was a sort of inspiration for all of this now 19 and reading computer science at the University of York Josh, the other one, also 12 when the club started is now earning his living teaching coding to kids with a particular emphasis on special educational needs and disability and is looking at going on and pursuing that as a career so incredibly exciting to think that these people who walk through the door with no knowledge have gone on to take this forward in their lives as adults so I think that's a wonderful thing well we were planning to come to EMF 2020 and in fact I pitched this talk for EMF 2020 but we all know what happened next sadly EMF didn't happen and Co de Dojo couldn't happen anymore we had to cancel it as everything got cancelled in March 2020 and we migrated it to teams and we tried to run on teams for a while and we had a modicum of success and there was one kid who carried on coming all the way through and was really really passionate and really bright lad who really wanted to progress but sadly eventually it ended up with like six mentors and him and that seemed a little bit disproportionate so sadly we wound it up at that point and we no longer ran on teams and then when the world opened up it was possible to progress I'd moved away a lot of the kids had moved on and were not interested and at the moment the thing is I'm afraid Moribond we're not running the Co de Dojo at the moment I'm hoping that someone will pick it up and start doing the admin but it's a great sadness really that this thing that had so much momentum and was so exciting has sort of fizzled out since this talk when I pitched it was not going to be that it was going to be a talk about this amazing club and that's the story of how we set up a Co de Dojo in our town