Starting up and running a Dojo: the first 6 months - Liam Friel

This talk will outline my experiences and (personal) opinions on setting up and running a Dojo, based on my involvement on the periphery of two dojo startups, and on personally starting off the Bray dojo.

I’ll outline how the Bray dojo started up, how it is organised, how it is run, what we have learned from the first 6 months of running a dojo, and how we built up to a reasonable sized (80-100 kids) weekly dojo.

I will touch on:

- volunteers/mentors

- material

- equipment

- money

- logistics

Transcript

1. Setting up a Dojo – Lessons Learned Liam Friel
2.  Startup phase: March ‘12 – August ‘12  Premises were the blocking issue  Build list of interested parents, start looking for premises  Hard => help needed from the start  May: First volunteer meeting  Technical Lead (me) and Admin Lead (not me)  Champion != Do All Work Yourself  20 volunteers. Maybe 8 actually do work.  May – August: looking for premises  August: Trial  September: Kick-off
3.  No volunteers, No Dojo  Get Parents Involved  Separate Admin and Technical roles  Double up on Everything If you can’t show up, and the dojo can’t happen, then you’re doing it wrong  Delegate and then delegate some more  Volunteering gets you (tw0) tickets
4.  Schools our most promising avenue in Bray  Initially rotating between three schools  Later one school offered us ideal premises, but  We could not start without money  We tried, but it just couldn’t be done  Our costs = €1000 before day one
5.  CoderDojo Bray cannot run without cash  Financial Snapshot, mid-Fed  Income: €1850, Expenditure: €1849 ▪ Donated equipment: ~€1000 ▪ Cash in bank: €449 ▪ Eh?  Spent on:  Insurance, Power cabling, Network gear  Project equipment  Garda vetting, cleaning, postage, paper, …
6.  Sources of income  Large Private donations  Small individual donations from parents  Selling coffees  Selling snack packs  This income allows us to be self sustaining indefinitely, however …  … project equipment will become more ambitious if expenditure allows
9.  We must restrict numbers (400+ mailing list)  We are physically space constrained to ~110 places @ 80-85% attendance  EventBrite tickets  One ticket valid for 6 weeks  Priority to  Mentors and Volunteers kids  Regulars (>80% attendance)  Expect to have “Ninja” tickets next session
10.  6-week prepared HTML/CSS  Mentor/Kid ratio: 1:6  Prepared lessons, week by week  Pro: Kids like structure Kids can see progress  Con: Utterly unsustainable Some kids can fall behind
11.  Session #1, 50 tickets, 150 mailing list  Announce that we’d like to issue more tickets  Announce that this will only happen with more mentors  Announce that kids of mentors get guaranteed place => mentors double to ~20+
12.  Repeat of HTML/CSS from Session #1  Scratch  Example + exploration  Sample code provided  Javascript following online tutorial  Pro: Scratch approach scales well, popular  Con: Following online tutorial sucks
13.  Introduce “Loyalty Bonus” tickets  Introduce hardware  Raspberry Pi x 8  Arduino x 6  Pairs of kids per setup  RPi: Linux, Web server, MySQL  Arduino: Sensors, LEDs, Colour Mixing  Hardware is just “playing”, no real projects yet
14.  RPi and Arduino in same space as Scratch  Deliberate:  Beginners and “Advanced” in same space  Tours of the RPi/Arduino tables Pro: Everyone gets to see the flashing lights Con: Very, very noisy 
16.  Starts next Saturday!  Proper Projects  Store the partially complete hardware between sessions  Introducing Python programming as new stream  HTML/Web technologies  Scratch Beginners/Advanced  Python  Hardware Projects
17.  Multi-disciplinary projects  Arduino as Sensor board  Raspberry Pi as Network Interface  Scratch or HTML as front-end  Get the different groups working together  Projects which last longer than 1 week
18.  Being organised helps  Child Protection is more than making your dojo safe  Ignore the hype. It’s not helpful.  Relax  No prodigies? No problem.  Some kids will leave. No problem.  You cannot please all of the people all of the time  Not all people are good
19.  Issues : Mentors  Currently have 10 admin volunteers, 8 untested  Keeping our current ~25 mentors engaged  Activities  Need to keep both kids and mentors engaged  Funds  We (Bray) definitely plan fundraising …  … to buy hardware to blow things up   … because blowing things up is cool
20. …Questions liam.friel@coderdojo.com http://ie.linkedin.com/in/liamfriel skype: liam.friel @liamfriel