Coderdojo Tanzania

25/8/2017

Just over one year ago, there was no Coderdojo in Tanzania and now there are two!

Coderdojo

Coderdojo itself is an amazing story. The first Coderdojo club was hosted in Cork, Ireland by James Whelton. He had famously hacked into the iPod Nano and his schoolmates asked him to teach them about coding. This concept of peer tutoring has developed (with the help of co-founder Bill Lao) into the Coderdojo Foundation with over 1,100 clubs in 63 countries.

Coderdojo Debrabant

Last year I had a mission to set up the first Coderdojo of Tanzania. Thanks the the great teachers and principal of Debrabant, that plan came to fruition. Read about it here
This year I returned with a gift of 5 Raspberry Pi's from the Coderdojo Foundation. The teachers were amazed and delighted with the gift and have great plans for their use. The possibilities are endless, especially with all the support materials available on the Coderdojo website.
Debrabant Secondary school is known as a very innovative school in Dar es Salaam. With 80 computers for use by the students, it is giving the students a great advantage preparing for their state exams. The school already participates in Young Scientist Tanzania and these Raspberry Pi computers might be incorporated in a project in the future!

Equilax (Computer Lab Technician) and teachers Paulina & Reginald with the Raspberry Pi's and a folder of Coderdojo Scratch, Raspberry Pi, HTML and App Inventor sushi cards I printed from the Coderdojo website. I also gifted Paulina with my volunteer t-shirt from this years Coolest Projects.

MEMKWA Coderdojo

This year my plan was to open a second Coderdojo in the COBET Street Children School. I spent most of my time with the COBET school last year and their teacher of that time Rodney. Read about it here
Since then Rodney has taken a job in the bank but his wife Irene has taken over as the full-time computer teacher. Rodney still maintains a huge interest and participated in the Train the Trainer sessions with Africa Code Week in June. He also takes some pupils in his spare time to do some further work on coding with them-basically hosting an unofficial Coderdojo! Some of the COBET pupils also took part in the Africa Code week training sessions in June.
He took a morning off work to catch up with me and was delighted with my plan of registering COBET as the second Coderdojo in Tanzania. We registered it in it's Swahili name MEMKWA and Rodney is the proud champion.

Rodney in the process of registering MEMKWA Coderdojo.