Setting up a Dojo – Lessons Learned Liam Friel 

 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 

 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 

 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 

 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, … 

 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 

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 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 

 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 

 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+ 

 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 

 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 

 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  

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 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 

 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 

 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 

 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 

…Questions [email protected] http://ie.linkedin.com/in/liamfriel skype: liam.friel @liamfriel