Last Year We Taught 1024 Children To Program At The Same Time! 😎

One huge venue, 1024 children and 200 volunteers. That's what we call a MEGA DOJO. Last year February we managed to get this amazing event running and I would like to share this day with you!

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If you are new to my series about children and programming,
please read me previous posts to get up to speed:

👉 Worldwide Free Coding Clubs For Kids - CoderDojo, Above All, Be Cool!
👉 Teach Your Children To Code! Are They Prepared For The Black Box, Digital and Creative Society?

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Happy Children, Smarter Children!

After a long day with a lot of hard work and incentives, these kids got to go home with a lot of new knowledge, motivation and inspiration. As a thank you and reward, all the kids received a certificate of participation which they can hang in their bedrooms as a reminder of this day. How you ask? Please do read on as I take you on a journey through the MegaDojo!

What happened?

On a wednesday afternoon 1024 children got together in Amsterdam for the MegaDojo, a special one-off event organized by CoderDojo Netherlands with their ambassador at the time, Ziggo (Liberty Global's daughter in The Netherlands). The kids would spend the afternoon building several games in Scratch themed around "Space".

📷 It takes quite some organization to get 1024 kids checked in!

The Venue

The MegaDojo took place in one of the biggest venues in The Netherlands, the Ziggo Dome. This can be compared to the O2 arena in London or Madison Square Garden in New York. In concert setting this venue can hold 17.000 people, but in this case we used only part of the floor and had a more conference-like setup with tables and seats for 1024 kids and a podium for presentation in front. The area was divided in a blue and red area, which each held 10 rows of 10 tables with 10 kids at each table. Every table would have 1 volunteer, each row another managing volunteer and each half had a Scratch expert keeping an eye on things. Finally a few flying keep volunteers walking around and making sure children would remain at their own table.

Kick off by Dutch Astronaut Andre Kuipers

To kick the event off, Dutch astronaut Andre Kuipers was so kind to help us out. Unfortunately he couldn't be there himself, so he recorded a short video in which he welcomed the kids. He explained about the importance of programming in his job and described some of the technological challenges he faced while in space. Finally he counted down to lift off like he was launching the kids into space! Have look at how this was experienced:

This still gives me goosebumps!

Lift off!!

The kids got started immediately and took to their laptops. There would be a challenge where a space ship needs to catch stars, or an astronaut had to walk around through a maze to find the exit and finally a space travel game where the astronaut and a cat would travel on a journey trough space. Check out some pictures of this day:

Special Guest

An event of this magnitude is bound to pick up a few special guests! In our case we had the privilege of welcoming Neelie Kroes, former European Commissioner for Digital Agenda. She is most well known for abolishing roaming costs for mobile communication in Europe. At the end of the afternoon she came by to have a look at what these kids were doing and to give a short speech on the importance of learning to program.

Recap in 2 minutes

Want to see an broad overview in 2 minutes? Check out this summery video:

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📷 All pictures have been released from copyright
by their photographers so we can use them in publications like this.

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Thanks for reading!
Feel free to follow me to stay up to date on more activities by CoderDojo to get children into programming and technology.

Next Episode:
Teaching children to program without computers or code!

In case you are wondering who I am, feel free to give my #introduceyourself a read :).