I'm a Coder Dojo Mentor

April 12th Event

So I was able to get in contact with Mike at the San Francisco Coder Dojo. He is the guy I talked to at the Geeks 4 Good Jam earlier. I showed up a little early and found a few people sanding outside the door. I had hoped that by getting there early I could help with any setup, but no one could enter the space early so I just hung out. Mike was already there too and was trying to get access. The space is the headquarters of GitHub, and there needs to be an employee there to let us in. An employee never showed up, but somehow the head of building security was contacted and a security guard let us into the main room.

Wow does GitHub have a nice office! Their bar was super impressive. I kinda wish I took a photo. I work a lame corporation, and it really hit that I am missing out on the startup life.

Anyway, there wasn't anything to setup. The main GitHub room that we use is meant for presentations so there was already tables and chairs out for everyone to use. Mike setup the projection stuff and I shyly introduced myself to the other volunteer mentors. I think there were 8 mentors there? There was about 20 kids I believe. I should have written this earlier, I have such a lame memory. Anyway, there were plenty of mentors there, so I was feeling pretty good. It was my first time doing something like this, so it was good to know that there would be people there that I could ask for help or follow their example as needed.

Project: Rock, Paper, Scissors in Javascript

Mike lead the event by going to http://code.org and having the kids warm up by solving some programming puzzles there. The site reminds me of the Alice environment that I used for one semester back at Chabot College. Very easy for the kids to use, and there are a lot of Angry Birds images to get them focused.

Later he brought everyone to http://jsbin.com and started walking everyone through the basics of Javascript and functions.

Problems

Around here people started to need help. He asked the kids to type out something like this:

var answer = prompt("Want to play a game?");
if (answer === "yes") {
    console.log("lets play!");
}

One kid was using an iPad for the day. When he typed "yes" into the prompt, the apple software keyboard was capitalizing the first letter. I was afraid that my explanation of "yes and Yes are different to a computer" would provoke some kind of unhappy response. Instead, for this problem and others, both adults and kids seemed to just accept the situation as-is. Few people seemed frustrated when issues arose. Also long as a mentor came over and helped, everyone seemed pretty happy.

Learning Javascript

At the end, everyone needed help with the part that uses some nested if-statements to decide if rock or paper or scissors won. For the younger kids, I don't think they really understood what was happening in the code. They just wanted to be able to type stuff and see something happen. There were a few older kids who seemed to be catching on. I hope those kids continue with coding and make something cool!

One of the kids already had experience with ActionScript. He wrote a function definition that declared a return type, I was impressed.

We used jsbin.com as the Javascript environment. Everyone got the idea of typing code and running it to see results in the console tab. However, jsbin will insert a closing bracket or parenthesis when you type an opening one and it often lead to problems. At the end, many kids had extra { and ( lying around in their code. It was difficult to explain that this was causing issues. When I instructed the kids to remove or move them around they quickly did as I asked and where happy when their program worked.

Conclusion

I was very pleased with how the event went! The kids enjoyed their time and I was surprised at how willing they were to follow our instructions and attempt the work we gave them. At the end the kids had used up their attention span and were ready to either run around or play minecraft, but two hours of their time was pretty good I think.

I chatted with Mike at the end and he told me more about the Coder Dojo organization. I seems that right now here is the number one guy to organize everything and is looking for help. He also said that often the ratio of kids to mentors is not as good as it was today. I plan on going to the next event and I hope I see some of the students there again.