coderdojo2
The Seattle CoderDojo group meets at Amazon’s headquarters in December.

For some kids, Saturday morning is a time for cartoon-watching.

However, for a few Seattle-area youngsters, those hours typically reserved for the tube have turned into time spent learning how to code.

It’s all thanks to the CoderDojo program, a non-profit networks of clubs around the world founded in Ireland two years ago that now teaches 10,000 kids every week.

coderdojo

In September, the Microsoft Store in University Village hosted the first-ever Seattle CoderDojo. It was organized by Greg Bulmash, a Microsoft content developer who also happens to have a fourth-grade son in need of computer skills.

Looking for a place that could help his child learn how to code, Bulmash came upon CoderDojo. When he found out Seattle didn’t have a club, well, Bulmash started one.

“I wanted something like this for my oldest son — and my younger one when he gets old enough,” he said. “No one else seemed to be doing it. I found a niche I wanted filled and started filling it.”

That first meeting in September drew about 20 kids and three volunteers. Since then, though, interest has grown as the group found a bigger space at Amazon’s South Lake Union headquarters. There are now 60-to-70 kids coming together every Saturday with more than 30 adult volunteers each week — and yes, there’s a waitlist.

The two-hour meetups typically start off with greetings and announcements and then move into something Bulmash calls the “Sorting Hat,” stage, where kids are grouped by skill and experience. From there, children start on a project or lesson for the day.

Greg Bulmash.
Greg Bulmash.

“For a lot of the kids, it’s like a weekly Hour of Code experience,” Bulmash explained. “But we also get in students who are more advanced and are working on projects for their own interests or for classes. In those cases, we try to provide a mentor who is experienced in that type of work to help them move forward.”

Bulmash said he’s seen all sorts of adults bring their kids to CoderDojo: Geek parents who work in technology, home-schoolers, random parents who heard about it from a friend, etc.

Kids are expected to bring their own device, which Bulmash admits limits students who don’t have access to a laptop.

“Eventually we hope to do some outreach across the technology gap, but right now it’s been three-and-a-half months since our first meeting,” he said. “We’re still figuring a lot of stuff out, recruiting partners, and building our internal infrastructure.”

The classes are free and CoderDojo is supported by its sponsors. The Seattle club hopes to expand its leadership in 2014 and organize a formal committee that can make the program more scalable. There’s also a “ParentDojo,” in the works designed to help parents understand what their kids are doing and support their learning.

There’s clearly an interest in Seattle CoderDojo thus far, and Bulmash only wants to see that grow.

“In a few years I’d like to see Seattle CoderDojo able to serve a few hundred kids each weekend with a few different regional meetups  — Eastside, Downtown, South King, South Snohomish — running in concert on Saturday mornings,” he said. “The demand is there. It’s a matter of building the infrastructure and awareness.”

Find out more and sign up for Seattle CoderDojo meetups here.

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