Community Night – Scaling What Works: 10th October

EDfutures Community Night: Scaling What Works

At this community night, we want to hear what you’re doing differently in education! This session will be facilitated by Sarah Dew, of Innovation Unit, London, where she grows new solutions to complex problems. With years of experience in this field, they’ve developed a model for what it takes to bring a great solution to scale.

To learn how to apply this model, we want to hear about your projects and ideas. What’s stopping you from growing and scaling your innovation? What’s working so well that you wish everyone was doing it? Tell us about it when you register for the event, and yours could be one of the ideas we workshop on the night.

WHEN: October 10th 2018, 5.30pm – 8.30pm

WHERE: Lotteries House, City West

WHY: Community nights are an opportunity for us to welcome new members and a create some energy and understanding around EDfutures. Each community night will focus on a different theme.

ABOUT THE FACILITATOR:

Sarah Dew 

Sarah is a Project Lead at Innovation Unit, with particular expertise in scaling innovation, and health and social care. Sarah is currently leading a piece of work for the Learning and Work Institute and the Work and Health Unit (jointly sponsored by the Department for Work and Pensions and the Department of Health) to co-design a new programme of support for people who are long term unemployed with multiple health conditions.

Sarah is an expert advisor on the evaluation of the Health Foundation’s Exploring Social Franchising programme, which is being led by Cordis Bright. To the evaluation, Sarah brings her insight on how to scale innovation successfully in the NHS. This is informed in part by the report Against the Odds: successfully scaling innovation in the NHS which she co-authored for the Health Foundation, and by her work with the NHS Innovation Accelerator (NIA).

Previously, Sarah was part of the team working on Better Endings – a year long innovation programme for end of life care in Lambeth and Southwark supported by Guy’s and St Thomas’ Charity. Sarah led the research to understand the health and social care context for end of life care, and led the development of Neighbourhood Care – prototyping a new model of community based support for isolated individuals at the end of life.

EDfutures Community Night: Mapping the System

In this session, facilitated by Matt Norman, we’ll discuss what systems mapping can do for you, and start to build a map of the education system in our city, state, nation and world. Maps like these can help us to understand the role that every sector needs to play in making change, and bring up some great questions about the infrastructure we need to make system-wide collaborative approaches possible.

WHEN: September 19th 2018, 5.30 – 8.30pm

WHERE: Lotteries House, City West

WHY: Community nights are an opportunity for us to welcome new members and a create some energy and understanding around EDfutures. Each community night will focus on a different theme.

ABOUT THE FACILITATOR:

Matt Norman

Matt is an education enthusiast exploring ways to develop future-ready and equitable learning systems. He currently works as a recruiter for Teach For Australia and has 4 years of experience running performance workshops with young people. Matt’s biggest questions right now are about experimenting with the design of learning experiences, and about crafting a collective narrative to drive change in education.

Connect with Matt @m_j_norman

EDfutures Community Night: Sensing our emerging future in education

WHEN: August 7th 2018, 5:30 – 7:30pm

WHERE: Lotteries House, City West

WHY: Community nights are an opportunity for us to welcome new members and a create some energy and understanding around EDfutures. Each community night will focus on a different theme. This month, Karen Wellington will be joining us to present key ideas on our theme of, “sensing the emerging future in education”, inspired by her recent involvement in Presencing Institute‘s program during the Perth Social Impact Festival (check it out!).

WIIFM: WHAT’S IN IT FOR ME?

ABOUT THE PRESENTER:

Karen Wellington

Karen is a social innovator and systems change catalyst. After joining the Fogarty Foundation in 2014, Karen led the growth of the CoderDojo WA network from 2 to over 130 computer programming clubs statewide. In 2015 Karen completed the Graduate Certificate in Social Impact at UWA under scholarship from the Australian Centre for Social Impact. She is currently completing a Masters in (Sustainable) Community Development and has been recognised as a Student Fellow of Murdoch University’s Learning Excellence Academy (LEAD). In 2017 Karen travelled internationally on a Westpac Social Change fellowship, investigating the question of “how could we collectively build a learning society that benefits all?”

Connect with Karen @Karentton

Shared drives and the Sea of Change

We thought it would be helpful to check in with the EDfutures community every now and then with a little round-up of what we’ve been up to at the Fogarty Foundation. And so, without further ado, here’s our EDfutures Round-Up: July edition.

Phew, OK, it’s been a crazy six weeks since we launched EDfutures on May 29th! Our mission at the Foundation is to support the EDfutures community to grow the BIG vision of our little ecosystem. While all the heads down, bums up action that entails is exciting, this round-up presents a good opportunity for us to pause and have a, “what the hell have we been doing with our lives?” moment.

After finishing up on launch night, I was seriously eyeing up the remaining Little Creatures Pale Ales! Being pregnant, I settled for a hot cup of Milo which, after reading the “nutrition” information, I decided was basically like eating a salad — Iron, B vitamins… Milo, my hero! I took a couple of days downtime to stare blankly into the distance and then it was right back to business.

What follows is a snapshot of some of the key initiatives we focussed on over the last few weeks — the ideas, who we talked with and what we learned….

CoderDojo WA are a finalist in the Most Impactful Social Benefit Category of the WAITTA Incite Awards, recognised for outstanding ICT solutions. Today the three of us from the Fogarty Foundation (Janelle, Rebecca and Karen) shared some of the successes and stories from the WA Dojo community with the judging panel.

Congratulations to every single member of the CoderDojo movement in WA. The nomination is recognition of all the amazing work you are doing getting young Western Australians coding. Now, fingers crossed for the awards in June.

Ninjas visit the Pawsey Supercomputing Centre

Some lucky Ninjas visited the Pawsey Supercomputing Centre during the school holidays. Here’s what a parent had to say about their experience:

“Yesterdays session at the Pawsey Center was fantastic. Lewis really enjoyed the whole experience. Pretty sure he was somewhat blown away by the place. David our guide was fantastic…he reminded me of Louis Theroux hahaha he gave out clear paths for the kids to follow if they wanted to be working at the center in years to come, which was great (could see some of the kids brains clicking over…coding is the way to go…so they are so on the right path). I know Lewis was buzzing afterwards as was I. I actually thanked Lewis, because if it wasn’t for his interest I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to even know the center existed and I’d like to extend that thank you too  everyone at Coderdojo. Such a brilliant experience. Thank you so much from both Lewis and myself.”

The Weekend West

CoderDojo WA and three of our Ninjas recently featured in The Weekend West. Read more about Lewis, Peter and Sophia’s experience at CoderDojo here.

Perth Games Festival

Did you visit us a the Perth Games Festival this year? If not, don’t worry, we’ve uploaded some photos and videos for you to check out here.

We had some very talented Ninjas come along to the festival to show off the projects they’ve been working on at the UWA and Midland Library Dojos. Game developers at the festival were very impressed! We look forward to having more Ninjas along next year to show off their work.

CoderDojo WA Birthday Bash

We had great fun at the Birthday Bash and hope you did too. A massive thank you to Murdoch University, Wesfarmers CEF, Bankwest and Gecko Steps for their sponsorship on the night and as always a big thank you to our partners Woodside and Scitech for their ongoing support, we couldn’t have done it without you! Everyone had a COOL time and we gave out some amazing prizes including:

Everyone also went home with a brand-new CoderDojo WA bag filled with goodies. Photographer Daniel Grant took some amazing photos. Can you find yourself?

Woodside kicked of their Dojo in July 2016 with a team of 12 Woodside graduates supporting the Dojo (5 Champions and 7 Mentors). They’ve impressively attracted 48 Ninjas to come along to their Dojo and they’ve even had appearances from a guest robot.

Woodside are now Coderdojo WA’s Principal Partner. Woodside also support Scitech, Coderdojo WA’s Founding Partner and we look forward to the 3 organisations working together.

Read more about the Woodside Dojo here where Joshua Goyder (a Woodside Graduate/Mentor) talks about his experience in his article ‘Three Things I Learnt Teaching 48 Ninjas to Code’.

Visiting Ireland – Home of CoderDojo

On the 7th of June, I had the opportunity to visit the CoderDojo offices in the super cool Dogpatch Labs in Dublin, Ireland. Ross (who many of you may know as the Dojo verification overlord and developer incroyable) was able to show me around the offices and I got to meet the Dublin team. Ireland is the birthplace of the CoderDojo movement, with the first Dojo established In July 2011, in the National Software Centre in Cork. Ross was able to show me some of the awesome projects that the team are working on, and he was keen to hear how they might continue to improve their support for us in WA. Go raibh míle maith agat! Thanks for letting me visit!

Also, congratulations on reaching 1000 Dojos across the globe as of last month…. 62 of which are from Western Australia.

Ps: on the way home from the meeting, my taxi driver was the parent of a Dublin Ninja.

CoderDojo: The Classroom of the Future

Over four Thursdays in May, CoderDojo WA presented to approximately 300 lead primary school teachers as part of the Department of Education’s professional learning event on the Digital Technologies curriculum.

Apart from a Cook’s tour of the CoderDojo program, the focus of the presentation was on 21st century learning, and how the CoderDojo model of fun, flexible learning within a STEAM (STEM + Arts) space might just be the future of education.

At the event, it was announced that the government is investing $2.7 million in new teaching and learning resources for all public primary schools, which includes a digital technologies resources pack of “programmable, interactive robots, electronic engineering resources to create real world projects and touch tablet devices preloaded with numerous coding apps.” Good news for any Champions in public primary schools.

National Year of Digital Inclusion

2016NYDIIn 2016, GoDigi, a partnership between Infoxchange and Australia Post, launched the National Year of Digital Inclusion (NYDI): a series of National Conversations and Pop-Up events that will be held across the country. ​Go Digi is a national four-year digital literacy program with the goal of supporting more than 300,000 Australians to improve their digital skills. Robyn King was at the NYDI Conversations event in Perth on the 18th of May to discuss how the CoderDojo WA community of Champions and Mentors works together to improve digital literacy for our Ninjas. Her presentation was entitled “Creating Coding Communities”.

The event included keynote addresses from Senator Scott Ludlam and Dr. Kate Raynes Goldie (Recently named one of MCV Pacific’s most influential women in games for the second year running). Other speakers at the event included:

Well done, Robyn, and congratulations to the GoDigi team for hosting such a successful event. To learn more about GoDigi visit their website: www.godigi.org.au

Australian Computer Society State Conference WA

13268288_276190412717035_3067047806041909756_oRobyn also presented at the Australian Computer Society’s state conference on the 19th of May (busy lady). At the event, Robyn joined speakers from CISCO, Boundlss, Woodside Energy and Human Sparks, and was also invited to present on a panel including Louise Smith, Australian Computer Society, Apara Chokshi, Bloom Labs, Tom Goerke, CISCO, and David Cook, ACS WA Branch Chairman. The topic of their discussion was “The Social Impacts of Technology: Good or Evil?”. Their discussion included topics such as end user licence agreements, wearable technology, the effects of technology on our health, whether artificial intelligence is an exciting development or a potential threat.

Perth has more Dojos than any other city in the world

Congratulations everyone…Perth is now home to 48 Dojos, with 50 Dojos in Western Australia! We saw a large jump in our numbers recently thanks to Ross from CoderDojo Global assisting with verifications, and it just keeps growing! These new bragging rights are testament to the AMAZING work Karen Wellington has done in helping to build and support such a wonderful WA community of Dojos. As Karen always says, “YOU ARE SUPER IMPORTANT”, and we can’t echo this enough! It’s always a pleasure to see how supportive the online community is, and how helpful you are when it comes to running and organising events, welcoming new Dojo family members, and just generally being cool. Hopefully we will see this number continue to grow throughout WA, helping more and more Ninjas to develop skills and passion in this important area. The future of WA is in good hands.

Kancho Calling – Dojo Census

In order to get a better picture of the Dojos in WA, we are asking Champions to please complete a VERY short Dojo census. This includes questions as to how the Foundation can better serve the community in 2016, and whether your Dojo is looking for mentors.

As well as improving our support of the community, we want to begin envisioning the next step for Dojos in WA, asking the question, “after CoderDojo, then what?”. Perhaps this will mean developing industry links and internship programs for Ninjas, perhaps it will mean helping Dojos to identify Black Belt Ninjas that we can support; however this unfolds, your feedback will be central to the process, and the Dojo census is the first step in achieving this. Thanks for your support.

Welcome, Rebecca

LOFR

In March we welcomed Rebecca Loftus, who has stepped into Karen’s role as the CoderDojo WA program manager. Rebecca has spent the past four years living and working in Karratha, as the Head of the Science Department at St Luke’s College. She moved back to Perth at the beginning of the year and is currently completing her doctoral studies at Murdoch University. Her research area is Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics (STEAM) education, which is a new model for education that, coincidentally, has a lot in common with the already established CoderDojo model. Welcome, Rebecca.

Welcome, Neve

Karen hasn’t had too much time to relax with the arrival of her mini-Ninja Neve Aniko Wellington on the 24th of April. We wish Karen all the best on this new adventure, and look forward to her return towards the end of the year. Welcome, baby Neve.

New Online Home

Our new Website went live in April. Huge shout out to Karen Wellington and Robyn King, for driving this change, and thanks to the folks at Draw History for doing such an amazing job! We are calling on the community to send us news, pictures and stories from your Dojos so that we can share the good work that you do with everyone in WA, and beyond.

“Dozens of digital technology ‘ninjas’ are spending Saturday mornings working on games, apps, robots and 3D designs at ‘CoderDojo’ in Geraldton. The pilot CoderDojo program will run throughout Term 1 and meets demand from local children and young adults who want to get creative with technology. The sessions are each Saturday 10-12 at Durack Institute of Technology and parents can register children to attend online http://pollinators.org.au/learning/coderdojo/

CoderDojo is a facilitated program fueling young people’s passion for coding and better understanding the technology that shapes their world. In each 2 hour session participants hear about inspirational examples and are supported by peers and mentors to work on their own digital projects. CoderDojo makes development and learning to code a fun, sociable, rewarding experience and similar groups are run in more than 51 countries.

At the end of the first session, participants gave high ratings and praise for the format:

“I liked having experienced coders to help me when I needed help. It was great having it at the TAFE since the computers I was able to use were effective and helpful.”

“…the coding was fun and tricky but I got through it. It was a challenge that’s what I liked.”

Andrew Outhwaite, Community Lead at Pollinators Inc described a little more about the motivation behind the pilot:

“As well as being fun and educational, CoderDojo provides skills and inspiration for young people pursuing digital careers. According to recent national reports, there is a projected gap of more than 100,000 ICT workers in Australia in the next five years. Another report estimated up to 25% of the State’s economy will be impact by disruptive digital and internet technologies in the next ten year.”

“If our region wants a slice of the massive growth in digital and tech industries, local programs like CoderDojo are essential. Working with schools, Durack, GUC and local businesses we can grow the local digital economy and be a ‘smarter’ city and region while still having fun with our digital devices.”

Darren Winterbine, Training Director for the Management, Automotive, Computing and Engineering portfolios at Durack said,

 “We are very supportive of this initiative to engage young people in coding.  In addition to providing a safe and inclusive space for the participants, our Computing Lecturers and students are volunteering to mentor and guide them through the program.” Mr Winterbine continued, 

“Our computer labs are up to date with the latest technology, making them an ideal learning environment for the group.”

The CoderDojo team are also on the lookout for technical mentors, and parent volunteers. Parents at the first session were already creating helpful automations for work and home using their phones and some fantastic software.

The CoderDojo pilot program is an initiative of Pollinators Inc thanks to funding and support from  Mid West Science Engagement Group, Inspiring Australia and Scitech. Local partners include Durack Institute of Technology, with Fogarty Foundation and CoderDojo Foundation providing program support.”

Story from: http://pollinators.org.au/2016/02/22/coderdojo_geraldton/