Seattle CoderDojo runs approximately 26 kids' coding events per year on the Amazon Seattle campus. Twenty-five of these events are run on Saturday mornings in the Wainwright building in five-week "sprints." The last event of the year is the annual Hour of Code at the Meeting Center. Our annual event calendar can be found at https://www.seattlecoderdojo.com/upcoming-events/

Our standard set-up during the year has 4 classrooms along a hallway on the 2nd floor of Wainwright.

Classroom 1: MIT's Scratch, a drag-and-drop coding environment for kids. https://scratch.mit.edu Lesson plans our primary Scratch room leader has created over the past 5 years can be found at https://scratchcats.org/ - kids are usually given a subset of these to choose from on a given day.

Classroom 2: The "Code.org Room" where absolute beginners are brought gently into coding using Code.org's Hour of Code exercises including the Amazon-sponsored "Dance Party" tutorial. Kids can receive a certificate of completion for their first time in this room.

Classroom 3: The "rotating content room" where we try to have a different five-week workshop each sprint. Topics have covered Arduino, Cryptography (with Python), JavaScript game programming (with Phaser), Mobile Apps with MIT AppInventor, Vim & Shell Scripting, Web Site development with HTML & CSS, and more.

Classroom 4: The "hacker room" where kids can bring their own project, get help picking a project or tutorial to learn advanced skills, or get help starting and working through the freecodecamp.org professional certification curriculum. Very self-paced, self-driven. We are also introducing "Interest Tables" where a mentor can lead the 3-5 students at the table through a tutorial/lesson of the mentor's choice.

We also have a fleet of approx 45 Linux laptops and Chromebooks that we use as loaners for kids who come to the events without a laptop to work on.

Seattle Coderdojo needs volunteers in the following categories:

Event Mentors (8-10 per event): Event mentors work in the classrooms, helping students complete their tutorials or projects. Requires 2.5 hours on the day of the event and up to 1.5 hours of prep pre-event. Event mentors may also propose and teach five-week workshops in the rotating content room or propose a one-day "interest table" lesson/tutorial they'd like to lead in the hacker room.

Event Ushers (non-technical, 1-2 per event): Event Ushers help staff the laptop checkout table and guide guests from the elevators to the correct classroom.

IT/Hardware (1-2 per event): IT/Hardware volunteers help maintain the fleet of Chromebooks and Linux laptops that we loan to students. They make sure that the machines are kept updated and work with mentors to add any needed software resources for current/upcoming workshops.

These are positions that don't necessarily have to attend the weekend events and can work their own schedule, but may have a bigger time commitment (5-10 hours a week) because of the scope of the volunteer work.

Tech Writers / Curriculum Developers: We need help building / identifying workshops for the rotating content room as well as better self-directed lesson plans to help students in the hacker room. We plan to organize bi-weekly meetings during the summer to keep all the volunteers who are interested in this on sync and then they would work independently on their selected projects.

Program Managers: There are a number of programs we'd like to start or which have been stalled because of bandwidth limits. Main ones needing people to drive them:

1. "Pop-Up Dojo" program - creating a "Dojo in a box" kit of laptops and hotspots that can go out to alternate locations to run a Dojo for 15-20 kids and provide opportunities to communities that aren't able to get to the Amazon campus on Saturday mornings. This would involve getting the kit together, then working on outreach to find and interface with groups and sites interested in a Pop-Up Dojo visit, then wrangling volunteers to staff the visit.

2. Volunteer Recruitment and Retention - We need help with recruiting new volunteers, improving the application and onboarding processes, and improving communication (and showing our gratitude).

3. Fundraising - We run "lean and mean," and don't need much money. Our expenses are mostly covered by the $10 voluntary add-ons some parents include in their ticket reservations. But with a non-profit partner who can take bigger donations for us and goals to hopefully expand the Pop-Up Dojo program, extra funds wouldn't hurt.

4. Teen Outreach - We get a lot of young kids, but we don't seem to get many teens. We have some ideas why, but we'd love someone who would like to take on analyzing this and working on initiatives to get more teens interested and make Dojo a rewarding experience for them.

Most of our rooms are "drop-in." Early on we learned that many kids can't attend every week. Some might have other commitments. Some might be children of divorce who have a parent who will bring them to CoderDojo and a parent who won't, and whether they can come depends on which parent they're with for the weekend.

Additionally, we don't have the luxury of having a group of kids who are all the same age and at the same grade level.

This creates a challenge of creating or finding curriculum that kids can benefit from at a granular single visit level, but also trying to create an ability to progress for those who can come regularly... while accommodating a range of ages and ability levels. We only really lift the "granularity" rule for the rotating content room, but even there, we try to make sure we have reference materials available so kids who miss a week can catch up at home.

When you have a room with 30 kids on 20 different models of computer, running 4 operating systems, standardizing the interfaces they'll be working with is both challenging and necessary. We most often try to work with web-based interfaces, using the browser as the great equalizer.

Why web-based? Some of the kids are on our loaners or on their parent's work laptop, and cannot reliably install software. Even when we have lifted the rule and done a workshop requiring installs, like Minecraft modding, the first workshop is just debugging the installs on everyone's machines. If there must be an install, it must be because the topic just couldn't be taught without one.

When we think about how we teach, putting the kids on the tools we use as professional developers may not be possible just because only some of the kids can run Visual Studio Community Edition or IntelliJ. Sometimes we have to find something good that everyone can access rather than use something better that would exclude kids or spend the whole first week on install debugging.

If you create a learning experience or are evaluating a free online tool/tutorial to recommend, keeping in mind what ages it's appropriate for is VERY useful. We need to be able to make accurate recommendations. Putting a 3rd grader on a high-school level tutorial/course can be a recipe for a frustrated and discouraged child.