 For my understanding, a lot of stuff will be thrashed out in discussion and questions and so on, but breaking the code skills for a digital era. So, go back a couple hundred years ago, you know, people didn't really think that reading and writing was that important. You got your day-to-day life and it was kind of the thing that was reserved for those who were highly educated. But as time progressed and reading and writing became more prominent in society, people realized the impact and necessity for it. And then some other things happened as well, like you had the printing press, Bibles and Renactor. I like to think that Back to the Future played a strong part in it. And reading became a very mainstream thing. Then you fast-forward another couple hundred years to, you know, modern-day planet earth where we're surrounded by technology and it's such a quintessential part of our society that now people are starting to become curious as to how it works and how we can manipulate it and use it and innovate. And maybe not so much this generation or generation, but the generation that are coming. So I'm talking about the 12, 13 year olds and below. And this is largely brought on by things like, you know, the widespread computers being everywhere, smartphones and the social network made it pretty cool to be a geek. So this is what they call a map of the internet. And this kind of illustrates all, like, the major points, connectivity around the world. And in this big, big map of the internet, all the information to create the next Facebook or innovate the next massive thing is there. I mean, it's all there. It shouldn't be that too big a thing to create this next generation of skills IT workforce. But there's one problem with it. And the one solution to how we create this next generation, this next workforce, purely lies in exposure in education. At the moment in primary and secondary level, majority of places there is no exposure to coding. Things have been developed in such a sandbox way that you're never exposed to rough edges. I mean, on the iPad and iPhone, for example, everything is sandbox, so you don't really have a chance until you know, really know where to go to code on it. So it purely comes down to exposure. So this grew frustration for me. I've been programming. My own personal background is I've been developing software since I've been about nine years old. And growing up, the one thing that frustrated me was why there's never any coding in the education system, that if you wanted to do coding, you had to go to third level. You had to know which horse to pick. And even then there was about a 75% dropout slash failure rate. So kind of going back to my own story and how I personally realized that and built through his own exploits and adventures, found out that there was an interest for this. My own story was that back as I continued to grow up in this system where there is no exposure to coding or no support for it, this was me when I won my first programming award at age 12 years old. I'd like to think I've changed a bit since then. But fast forward on a few years and I was in sixth year and I won a Christmas time, I won an award for web development. And this was around the time that the Social Network film had its peak of popularity. And after it was called out of the school and it's gone, a few people approached me and said, Hey James, that's really cool. Well, how are things like iPhone apps made or how are things like Facebook made? So I decided to hold an impromptu, small, get-together with people who are interested in technology in my school and maybe teach them small things. But keep it very secret and very low level. Kind of like Fight Club but with keyboards. So initially what I thought would be maybe four or five of my friends showing up after school to the computer room to learn how to do this. And probably be like a breakfast club, keep it all good. Turned out to be about 40 people from my school. And through there for the rest of the year, twice a week, I would teach computer coding and have it develop websites, games and so on. So that was the exposure to this group of people. And the thing with coding is it's kind of an infectious activity because as soon as you expose one bunch of people and they're developing their websites and they go along and they show their siblings, their families, their friends, things they've made and how easy they could do and demystify the whole area. More people wanted to do it. And setting as our computer group grew in school, we had external pupils from other schools wishing to come after school to do it. So then when we met Bill, purely for me knowing how much it sucked in the education system it was a massive demand before we kind of teamed up and created what is coded OJ. So we did the two things that we can do to target in the education system to really nail this exposure to it, showing pupils demystifying it, again with this type of infectious activity. And because all the information exists out there on the internet, all you need is direction. If you go to a career guidance teacher and you say, you know, I'd like to go into living and make iPhone maps or I'd like to make web apps, career guidance teacher counts to friendship. Nor can they tell you what the correct course for you to do is. Majority of times you shouldn't actually, if you're a hell bent on creating iPhone apps, you shouldn't go to college. You should actually take those four years and go straight into the profession and just learn online. It's time better spent. However, you know, it's not the way that the system is at the moment. So those are two things we need to combat at the moment. So kind of going on from coded OJ on, bringing up the speed and what coded OJ is if you haven't heard of it, young people essentially come on a regular basis, learn how to code, hack, create apps, games and more. And it's all 100% free and all volunteer based. It's kind of like the Boy Scouts of Coding in a sense. And more officially, you know, this is coded OJ. This would be coded OJ and this would be coded OJ. So that kind of gives you a good illustration of the demand for this. And however, that it's not such a high level subject that, you know, you have to be post second level to do it. You see people as young as them. I think this guy's like five or six here at this. So it's something that's open to all ages. And stuff that various OJs have done around it. It's not very, it's not small, low level stuff. You know, you've got HTML, CSS, JavaScript, which all websites on the web are programmed in, Google, Facebook, so on. See, Node.js. Node is a language that's really come out of the woodwork in two years. It's being celebrated as a very real sign, very language that will have a big impact on technology. Yet it's too recent for computer science courses to take in and factor. But it's something that coded OJs are teaching for kids. And a variety of other subjects as well, topics. So in addition to all this, and coding is great, but you really need skills to go with just the knowledge about a code. So with coded OJ, we've seen as well these kids that are making friends, they're doing problems, all these skills. It's an environment to ask questions, get advice in direction, do all that they've done, get around about their ideas, collaborate, a number of other things. And keeping the correct mentality of it, keeping things open source, free software, good conduct, and importantly helping others. Again, with this kind of infectious nature of it, by getting kids to teach other kids to spread it out, it's something that's very powerful in spreading this. So some things we did differently to the education system. So first off, when me and Bill decided that we wanted to keep it free and keep money completely out of it, we kind of worried if it would be abused as a free babysitting service. So he said, if you're a parent or if you're 12 or under, you have to bring a parent with you. And this had a few knock-on effects. It meant that kids who were only really interested would drag their parents out of bed in the Saturday morning. It meant that parents and kids would spend time together in the pond. But it also meant that if a kid did not get something, that parents would be more comfortable putting up their hand and asking a question, and the kid would see that it was okay. And to create this whole environment of asking questions was okay. These sessions with the self-learning emphasis, so instead of having a very detailed kind of bullet point, do this, this, this, and this, kids were open to take something, a new aspect of a language or a new topic or something in the programming language and then expand it themselves. Or also Google and try to add things so that there was no kind of restrictive rate at it that people could excel or both their own faces need to be. Relax that, Miskir. One rule would be cool. This kind of global thing that we have implemented across the organization. Get money out of it, just to keep it more transparent and simple. Getting kids to bring their own laptops so that in order to set one up, it was a lot simpler. Code homework for a place. In some places that had massive demand, they started giving homework so you could secure a place. I think Dublin, when it started off, it would take a 90, a Saturday, you know, the waiting list of over 200. And when they would open bookings up on a Monday, about half-five often, I think their record for being booked out was under a minute, so they were more popular than Westlife. So at the end of showing resources so that kids could go home and learn and continue outside of this environment. Again, kids teaching other kids. I mean, let's face it, we're all old. We're all old. We're expired. The environment that we grew up in is now different to what kids are growing up in at the moment. So most often kids can convey things better than to each other than we could because they can be a bit more contemporary or so on. So I think in summation, there's all these tools and everything is out there in order to make this happen. And the root of that, and it's not necessarily any of it's fault, but the root of the cause is in the education system and just exposing and getting information in there in a very, in a proactive fashion. But unfortunately, the Department of Education is another viral last altogether, so sometimes we have to create things exterior to the system in order to influence it. So no, does anyone have any points of discussion or comments on that? I went through it like that. It was a lot slower when I practiced it. I just like to ask if I might just, it's kids teaching kids, I'm just wondering, are there any kind of cross-generational aspects to it? Yes, so most often in adults, and we've got Ada which brought it to Galway and did massive success with it here as well. You can testify to this, but you would have an adult and experienced version who would lead the session. But if, let's say, one kid got it here and another kid didn't get it, you'd get a kid to help them on the kid. Or often if you've got someone new to a higher level class, sometimes other kids can help that kid get up to speed. So it's quite a, rather than kids leading the session, on a more smaller level, you would have a lot of kids helping each other. So can I just, I'm just going to use the decision to show you and just ask another question. What are they? What are they? I said the issues. You said that you teach, I suppose coding, apps, hacking and more. Like I read in your slide too about hackathons and then what is it that grabs people's interest that they want to learn? What are the driving courses? I think it's purely the ability to create something. I think that kids want to be able to, if kids have an idea that this is a means to do it. I mean it's not that when we go in a very factual technical way we're illustrating each point of the language. It's like, hey let's make a game or let's make a cool website for like your GA club or something. So it's the ability to create something and basically it's a whole new frontier. And there's something really powerful about a kid seeing their webpage off on the internet for the first time. We call it the class moment of Cork. Sorry, do you understand? No, I'm just going to call it the class moment because the very first time I said time and time again you get a kid, you give them a text editor, you get them to put in a few lines of HTML code and you say, look, now write a message, any message you like. And they save the file and they open it in a web browser and up comes this message that they've written in a web browser. Like they've created a little piece of the internet albeit local on the desktop. And the look on their faces when you say, hey look, we've just created a first-world page. The look on their faces is a process, very energetic but the universal core response is pretty much, that's class. I just want to ask, it seems that you're providing a really important service but maybe the education system should be providing such a resuggestion. So I think that the government has enough problems as it is at the moment and not so much on the full front of the Department of Education. Most certainly there's been a few politicians on myself and Bill have conversed with but it's more we're starting to see teachers kind of step away from that. I did a teacher training session up in the BlackRock Education Centre last night kind of illustrating this like all about 30 teachers between the ages of 30 to 30 to 30. We taught them how to make websites and so on. It's more that people are realizing that the department hasn't taken a proactive step on us. And if they do, due to bureaucracy and that could take a long time to implement. So people are starting to go outside the system and do this and bring it back in. I would add to that. We have one of the champions of Kododojo, Dublin and Eugene is actually involved in Irish computer societies input into the curriculum. Because there is a move to make a junior search module. Now we have absolutely every respect and support for other educational systems. And that said, we've deliberately baked into this a lot of features that you wouldn't normally imagine. So we spent a lot of time coming up with the name and the brand. We wouldn't have worked and travelled so far if it had taken the original name of Seth Landmoyne programming class for kids. The brand itself though Kododojo, a dojo is a martial arts temple of learning. And that is actually the model that we try to replicate. If you come here and done a martial art you So one person that's great you would know though that when you go to a martial arts dojo you don't have somebody at the front of the room with a blackboard drawing out the moves that you're going to make. You have a subject matter expert and you have a group of attentive students who interact with each other in terms of sparring. But also you have people of varying skill, helping each other out, learning, sparring with them, gaining knowledge and then you have some top subject matter experts who can really answer any question, any problem. And that model is how dojos work. Now it's proven to be extremely effective it has the best elements of childhood learning. It is highly social so not only we're making a generation of high tech wonder kids we're also having them play well with others, which is if you've worked with technical people that can sometimes be a gap. So if you look at the system of education itself, not just the departments and bureaucracy but actually the way western education occurs and you compare it with the dojo system of educating there is a lot of arguments to say that eastern philosophical learning system actually could be applied to a lot more different things. Dojos have been around for a couple of thousand years they're a global success arguably martial arts graduates are everywhere even though there may be only a few in the room. Whereas the western education system arguably has quite a few issues that are unresolved and may never be resolved. I just spent the day with the good folks that educated together running a workshop with them and I think they've got some great ideas and they're making a huge impact at the same time I still see that they're constrained within a model and we've come up with a different model and it's working and the other thing I'd like to say about Kododojo is it's resolutely free we don't have a bank account we don't have a central bureaucracy but the most central stuff we have is a website and he just about kills himself giving it together and people might say well that makes us vulnerable actually it makes us strong because in some of the toughest economic times we've ever seen this movement has gone in under a year from one dojo to 104 globally to 40 dojos in Ireland alone to thousands of kids actually learning to get this passion and to get interested at the right age. There's a lot of evidence to suggest that your brain is at its most neuroplastic when you are between the age of 7 and 17 that is the ideal time to learn languages it is a mistake in my view to view coding as a science it is much more akin to learning a great language and if you learn a native speaker the best programme as I know are like poets they can cram so much more into so few lines of code I once worked in a project where they suggested that we would pay the programmers based on how many lines of code they would write and that just didn't work because a great code is very compact it's refined and it does a lot with very little great user interface design the same that's not something that comes easy to somebody who comes aboard late in life it's not impossible but it's much more difficult so if you can get that interest if you can get that dual language ability young we find that's very powerful can I ask a question my sister is involved in the setting of the Athlon coder dojo so I went down to see my little nephew he's 5 when he started and I was 6 and it was quite interesting to link with the dojo because he's big into his compo but the one thing that I suppose slightly saddened me was the sheer lack of girls of the coder dojo so I took a great exception to one part of James's presentation where he said it's like the Boy Scouts for Code I would say it's like the Scouts for Code which includes boys and girls there are plenty of dojos can sail amongst them where there are actually more girls than boys and we have lots of girl mentors and you know it's something that we are utterly committed to to getting not just a gender balance but an overall equality so that end too we've just partnered with Kamara for the recycling of laptops to schools they're offering us their hubs across Africa and Jamaica to host dojos in developing nations so we're trying to make sure that wherever this can take root and flower and blossom it does one particular trick I've discovered is if you start a dojo go to the local girls school and announce it there first and you tend to get more girls come to the dojo first it seems that if lots of girls attend the dojo guys eventually show up anyway so kind of adding on to that as well at the moment in technology about 7-9% of all programs are female so there's a massive imbalance and it's been something that I did quite a lot of conferences I've been to there's been a lot of discussion around and as Bill said it varies in some dojos but majority of them we do see a very good balance of 30-40% and even in New York last weekend they had 60 children and 50% female so it is something that we're starting to see a change but obviously across all dojos I mean I thought that wasn't good experience because there was just a handful out of the whole group I was just wondering is it something you could do that was girls because they do different entries so just something and I think it's a huge loss because I don't think that women are at less able to do but if you're stereotyping at that age it's a bit scary it's something that in person I haven't quite cracked why coding is so appealing to the majority of males and not all females there's something actually very interesting we were talking about before and we're going way back but back in Russia prior to America's influence there's a greater number of academics and scientists who are female than males but when American TV came in and portrayed females in the home roles and so on and males out working being the breadwinners that completely dropped I mean out of it was something like they actually had to put in quotas in place in Russia so that males could get to universities to do these types of things and that's just a small sighting but it's still something that the technology community is very aware of when they're just trying to combat and I think maybe in some of the more I mean there's a bit of a side-circuit between Atlone and New York but for these kind of smaller types of communities things that can be done to try and encourage more females Yeah, the interesting thing to know what is still a trick and can say or if there's such... It's really promoting it to the girls school first So... I mean seriously it's an issue that we do take very seriously at the same time we are an open child living organization so one of the issues that we have is that we don't want to be prescriptive so everything we try and do we try and do through encouragement and that's our curriculum is encouragement and people say it's the language the curriculum is encouragement the rule setters be cool we've tried to make it very simple so that it can replicate So in terms of like do you have a curriculum in terms of what is done every week or is that just purely done to the volunteers to sign into one to one text? It varies from dojo to dojo we have a couple of lessons that we think are really good like the first... just that class move and seeing somebody install a text editor and actually edit their first web page seems to be a pretty universal one some dojos are more formal some are less some focus more on scratch some don't in Kota Dojo in the Science Gallery in Dublin because they have a lecture theater they do get guest speakers who do lectures in Marn Point we have one giant room and we have a couple of projectors and so we have newbies at one end and then we have intermediate and then we have advanced you could get any sort of presentation in any of those things one of the other innovations that we are doing in Marn Point is that we are starting a kind of incubator program because we have a few companies that like you know recently done the software so a couple of guys who I think 16, 17, 18 years of age have started their own web development company and so we are giving them a space without rent initially to start up then move elsewhere in the building once they are up to speed Harry with his pizza bot has been making money from Kota Dojo from the very start and the pizza bot started as an open discussion between kids who wanted to create one app and we see lots of that the the desire to learn is there and a lot of what we do is just get out of people's way at some point is just tell the parents I am happy that they put their hands up but I am not happy when they touch the keyboard so I will just let your child have the keyboard I think the other thing to say is that open flexible system the fact that you see in Dublin a different type of environment to cork and you see different results out of each on a global scale makes it very interesting because then different places do things better they can incorporate it to the overall system I mean even in the sense of how when we started off how people would get spaces that came out of an incident in Dublin where we had 20 people sign up for our first so we were like excellent small number first one outside of cork and we had about 60 show up in Google security staff freaking out and so on and so as each we reviewed things and had different environments it kind of feeds back there's a question I was just going to ask you about taking the parents hands do you ever get inquiries about a separate sort of dojo for parents all the time my answer is basically if you want to come to a dojo adults must be coming by my dojo somebody said I'll have to rob a child no that said the tragedy that was about to fall us was that an entire generation of kids was going to grow up completely as digital users with almost no digital creatives and those few that did become digital creatives were going to do it isolated by themselves in their bedroom without support and that just doesn't work I don't see any upside from that system persisting so as long as we can keep a context and an environment where learning happens naturally for free so that anyone can be included I think free is the ultimate point of inclusion that to me is mission accomplished and if it's growing around the world that's also great because I believe it does brand food to have cork seen as the centre of the IT universe by a whole lot of kids like on Saturday there were a whole bunch of kids in LA that were aware that cork was where this thing started sorry Efean sorry Efean I'm just wondering are kids in toilet type majority can just do it it's a weird one do you know why I'm saying a self-taught type is but I do it wrong so I'm constantly correcting myself and I just think that a lot of kids there's so much time wasted yeah well I just kind of to say why I learned to use paint bush by painting like it's just a lot of kids instinctively do it again as Bill said it's this digital generation people are freaked out now because like 2 and 3 year olds they can use iPhones already instinctively and a lot of things have been designed to be as you know to be used as native as possible so it's not something that we have really kind of crossed our minds it comes up when you get like a 4 year old who is very hunt and pack and you think to yourself oh maybe we should be teaching type I mean I don't know if you should be teaching us but I think we should be watching outside yeah very possibly at the same time you know I see other kids who just touch type faster than I ever will and they're you know we have it's also you know if you have a programming editor you know it's a different style of keyboard interaction anyway in my view but there's a you know there's a 9 year olds down in Cork who's one of the best javascript developers I've ever seen and he talks faster than I think I'll ever imagine and yeah he's 9 he's about that tall so it varies I think also we're starting to see things like scratch which are symbolic languages that you sort of move blocks around to make the program work and there are things like Google Blockly which as we're taking now you can assemble the program in blocks and then press a button and it turns into javascript so I think that there are going to be some innovations in user interfaces that are coming that may reduce the need to type significantly I think Apple Siri is another interesting thing you know it still amazes me but this thing here which is you know iPad 2, 3 whatever it's still programmed with the most basic text editor in the world on generally you know on desktop computer that's it's kind of an echo an echo to me can I just ask the question which smartphone do you have and why is this for GQ magazine or Apple buy a phone no I use I'm pretty when it comes to smartphones and computers I'm pretty agnostic with it but at the moment I'm using an iPhone to me because I also develop iPhone apps as well and I don't know they've had a you can get into a whole debate about why Android is different to iOS in terms of not just visually but the teams and the emphasis that they both have on them but I just I kind of like iOS that's what I use I have to ask the question quite differently I have an iPad the last one I've had and I have a nice monster headset I develop iPad apps not iPhone apps I do not carry a mobile phone at all anymore I've got the holy water now half of it is the most controversial thing you heard at first look I'm not one I have one it's just the iPad and not even a bluetooth headset I have an actual plug it in headset so that's it that's for me so I know that I have time from when you started out you were kind of surprised you said you were surprised and people turned up and the success of the group what do you think was the key ingredients that made the success and then where do you see the next step I think that's actually what's brilliant you're just saying exposure so the R2 equipment has been supplied to developing countries I think that's a great combination thanks I think that there was a couple of elements for it I think one it was kind of around the right time and the people were legitimately as a result people were interested in this because they kind of bought a new light and a lot of these things like hey I can make iPhone apps seeing things in the new light but I think also the fact that it was in school that we took a different teaching style and approached the school I mean school sucks for kids when I was teaching it I'd be in there for five days a week and when people came to the coding club after school they didn't want that same environment so it was just a lot more fun and engaging and it was leisurely people enjoyed being there I think a lot of it was just timing the fact that and it's again with this generation who've grown up in this world I suppose the next steps for Kodarojo Kodarojo is exploding I mean today is the 28th or today is the 26th two days it's a year old two days it's one year old my vision for Ireland would be to have 3,000 portraits one in every county every parish I've done the numbers you can actually have a 10 person dojo in the smallest parish and I was very easily on the current numbers it would be a mentor around to do that I would love to see that happen globally I'd like to see similar impact I would also like to see dojos teaching all sorts of other stuff in Galway they created a thing called At Speak where they're trying to link up dojos in different parts of the world to learn different languages not computer languages but actual human languages when we start Chinese I'm sorry I'm not sure we did it and I think At Speak is fantastic it's that sort of thing you know there really is a powerful a power in the system of learning that a dojo has that I think is untapped that can be used if you can teach karate and you can teach programming there's got to be a lot of other things that can be you know taught now I would say that in a different way actually it's not about teaching it's about having people learn and so if you create an environment where people learn where young people learn especially that can be adapted to lots of things and it would delight me completely just to see this sweep the world and not for anything other than I believe it's good for us as a species to have more learning and caring for free and quality learning and I think as well the way it's going is it's transcending just a organization it's becoming more that we think of software as a sport and you'd go to a software global webinar organization and I think that's just the mentality we kept on us and I think for a lot of young people now it's got a sense of identity associated with it it started surprising me when kids would rather themselves as you know people who go to Kodorojo that they're a part of like their own Kodorojo so I think that in the same way the people who would have gone to scouts they wouldn't call the scout or whatever but I think that there is a tendency it's worth it and it's all kids as well actually it's not just a closet marriage and all it's one thing that's coming up you can see you've got football guys who have been playing football in the morning and then you've got guys coming into karate suits actually because they want to karate afterwards it's so inclusive and that's I think one of the myths of being a creative it's very possible to be good at sport good at creativity good at writing good at music we all have the capacity to be multi-talented if we're encouraged and a lot of the sort of narrowing that we see is actually a hangover from a different time and we need to adapt that sorry we have another question here sorry guys I miss a young player and I don't know what to say just speaking how can you make it so that how can you get into it whatever you do I'm just sorry I remember a while ago I heard a speech from Colin Powell he just he said that one day it's the group that came down he said he said no I'm not that's not me and he said it was created last time 10,000 dollars I can't take it down and he just said the point was that he had no choice and a lot of people they don't have choice because it's so attractive or something you can't actually feel disconnected you know get interested in people get involved was when James shared his story about there was an announcement over the school PA and people sought him out I don't know if you remember being in school but seeking out the nerve is not actually a behaviour that's common there are partings you know and so that told me a random announcement in a random school can result in unusual behaviour and created this demand that meant there was a market demand there and that we should do something to fulfil that demand and so all we've done is try and replicate that first thing which is get the announcement over the PA system this thing exists it does work, people love it the young people love it, the mentors love it now I have mentors in my point who come up to me at the end of each session with the biggest smiles on their faces because something's worked someone's got something and they're just totally buzzed I invite you all come to spend five minutes in a Coda Dojo anywhere and I will absolutely stand and take that you will come away going wow that's a lot of energy in that room now the gender balance wasn't perfect but you would have to reach the energy in the room pretty amazing that is really buzzy and really good and renewing for the mentors and whether you turn up to one dojo a month or one dojo a week the response has been that just that energy is a benefit to the mentors so I believe that everybody in the system is actually benefiting from it and the people who donate the spaces for three hours a week or four hours a week also are getting better football better recognition a community form around their venue that wasn't there before and I think these things actually give us a very long term sustainable impact as well and again keep the costs to zero I just to interject we have some part of the ocean right as an argument right we have our dojo kids demo stuff they've made all the last five months two thousands of tourists like Ben said it's not even it's trans into the classroom and it's really put an hour on the map so it's pretty spectacular and those are the things you don't foresee but they're really positive spin-ups what about the dojos and Devon you mentioned there are seven dojos and how do they differ as in from place to place Adrian was speaking about the dojos a lot of it just comes down to demand but there is some sheer demand that people want that people are willing to to travel to other places to do it I mean it kind of also falls down into like availability of space and then accessibility so like Devon the one in the science gallery in Pierce Street taken 19th of Saturday and that was the kind of first one that's quite often the flagship one for Devon and then you have one out in DCU and Blatchestown and DIT and a few other places as well and it was in the car somewhere in Canada today so a lot of it just comes down to pure demand and it's not that we're reading on the side of music we're teaching the world to code it's that to have something there for kids that want to do it and have them know that this is there and what we've simply seen is that there is just a massive demand for it and all of the adults that are there with a rented or stolen child yes confirmed and of course the parents parents are there we're quite even though we have one rule we have a pretty strong guideline on parents sticking around it helps the interaction it makes the community better it gives the dojo more strength and it also breaks down a lot of barriers so I do see parents learning stuff side by side and I do see parents having very open discussions so I don't normally see in other environments which is kind of cool yeah just being in the energy of the room also helps in your muscle that was a very clever rule thanks I know that James is anxious to head up yes I have to run as to hop on his longboard and as to try not to get hit by the car so I want to thank you obviously for being here because today I think we've all found it quite informative and we will have a copy of your slides and obviously the video will be available on our website that's an interesting point that you're actually learning by teaching because in fact you won't remember the joke absolutely and that is actually a fundamental part of the dojo system of learning so we're very happy that that happens and that really is part of the design it's funny that part of the impetus for the name and so forth is because my own kids did kendo and James has also done kendo and not many people know this but kendo dojos are also free kendo sensei is not supposed to charge and so I figured if they can be doing that for a thousand years globally we can do the same another thing I noticed a lot of people say I've only got basic coding skills I couldn't be very useful actually that's not true anyone can encourage anyone else and even the most basic skills are great I've had some of the most advanced coders I've ever seen come into the dojo give a lecture and halfway through the lecture realise that half their audience is actually ahead of them so it's okay that you are not maybe you know fully up to speed as long as you can do encouragement as long as you can help people find stuff out and google you're absolutely welcome to be a mentor can I just ask one more question there's 104 dojos around the world it could be 105 by now any mark differences between them all I mean I know you haven't gotten to see them they're all different every single one of them is different there's a series of having an organisation that has a context there are some things that are universal and there are a lot of things that are completely variable and that is good it makes us robust it makes us diverse I'm a great believer in the power of diversity in the power of listening to nature and I think children have got a great nature if you just let them collaborate let them work together I'm regularly told by parents walking into the dojo that their kids just are never this obedient never this quiet never this you know focused until they hit the dojo which is pretty proud of our so have we any more questions I'm just a question of how does it spread so quickly if somebody in New York how does a quarter of a group come into being in New York for example you encourage quarters how do they do this I did a lot of work on social networking and on viral marketing in parts of my career and so we wanted to make sure that it was a brand that travelled that had a reasonable amount of central backup in terms of a nice website we wanted to make sure it was easy to follow if you're going to make a movement you want to be easy to follow so we wanted to make it very simple I think it's two pages and you read those two pages and you can start a dojo so part of it was just making it easy part of it making it the brand to kind of cool and interesting and the rest has just been trying to get as much word of mouth as much power as possible so James and I both speak where we can we share the stories not just of the dojos but of the kids in the dojos so I talked about Harry I talked about Dharma Software I'm always trying to celebrate what's going on in various dojos because that gets the story out that's much more interesting so far that's all we've done people take this they take initiative and service to serve themselves yep most dojos have one or two maybe three champions they might not be coders they're probably parents they want this for their kid because their kid is really passionate about this but currently spending a lot of time in their bedroom they're looking for something that's more social and so they start it and they contact us through the website and the first thing we tell them is read the instructions find yourself a venue once they have a venue we put it up on the site we've just announced a partnership with Hayes who are a specialist recruitment agency so we're going to start getting mentors through their IT recruitment network if they can't find a free venue we'll try and hook them up with a local sponsor if we can find one Intel sponsors the science gallery dojo most of the dojos are sponsored by the owner of the building but some very high profile locations are sponsored by other sponsors and once the venue is in and we've got a mentor then the rest is up to them how often they want to schedule and usually the first dojo is maybe 20 kids and then the next is 50, 60 and then you've got a kid in Ross Carberry which is not the biggest town in Ireland they've got 40 kids in the dojo in chronic guilty the experimental night they had where they were just like running doing a dry run and you know 35 kids showed up and the next week the room's packed the demand for this the desire just to even peek behind the curtain and have just a little look how you can actually change something in the computer sphere how you can bend the internet to your will and just even a little bit that desire is massive and it's everywhere so it's pretty easy for them to set up the interesting thing to me has been how consistently they've continued though so far we've yet to see a dojo start and then start all of them have continued which I think is also a great thing the other part of my vision is that I want to see the kids who end up very talented and dojos also stick around and bring on the next generation and the next generation have you encountered any kind of level of opposition in the IT world or digital world more generally I know you said that you operate in an open source space and I'm just wondering is it the case that it would ever be considered that you're training essentially people with the same skills and who might compete with people who are already established in the IT world or is it embraced more as a spirit of innovation with the creative people come up with newer and better ideas most of the commercial training things that I've seen have been things like W3 schools and Code Academy and we see them as allies rather than opponents so far everyone's been very welcoming and very happy to work with us we offer and we're starting to offer belts and badges we're not offering certification so I think most of the heavily commercial institutions are selling certification they're not actually selling the course as much as they are the certification so I don't think we conflict if anything I think we complement what they do I think that's probably starting I like the hour to end as I like what you said about embracing the nature of children and allowing children I suppose to find the solutions and the fact that the dojos are very much child-centric and it's all about learning I think that's something that's really inspiring especially in these current times the very fact that you work on it you're a non-profit organization and you operate for free is also very commendable and I think it means that first-leg language is a very necessary skill that you'll essentially have opened up to so many more people and I hope that your ambition that there would be what is it, 7000, 3,000 around 3,000 GA halls in the country I don't see why we can't have 3,000 dojos as well I think it's very possible to pick up a hurl one day and pick up a keyboard the next and I think both are excellent I'd like to thank both for joining us today thank you so much and please spread the word obviously if you can click on the more hits we have on our website the better and spread the word you can obviously tweet about our event today and we'd be glad to hear any of your feedback our next Young Professional Network event will be a table quiz which will be hosted in the Mercantile and Dame Street on the 12th of July and I'll be in contact with you about that so thank you so much for staying and there's some nibbles and wine if you'd like to stay on for some time so thank you very much