We announced our intentions to relaunch York CoderDojo to the city of York in March 2020. We had just entered the first Coronavirus lockdown which had suspended our York Pi Jam digital making activities, and we were looking at ways to better our services for the people of North Yorkshire. 

 

Due to numerous further waves of Coronavirus restrictions, we only were able to launch York CoderDojo in June 2022, with the previous organisers sadly having to stop running the sessions back in 2017. 

 

York CoderDojo sat alongside our other digital making activities and is a friendly place to meet and develop coding and tech skills or to learn something new. York CoderDojo run free informal sessions where young people from 7-17 and families can come along and work on projects, develop new skills, participate in challenges, whatever they want. Our dedicated volunteer mentors are there to provide guidance, encouragement & support in a relaxed environment. 

 

Since then, we have ran York CoderDojos bi-monthly and they have remained free to allow young people the same opportunities when it comes to digital literacy. Since launching on the new My Keeping Digital platform, York CoderDojos have continued popular in demand and we often find them becoming fully booked within days of free tickets dropping, resulting in us launching extra tickets and actively looking at new venues in the city to allow us to expand capacity. 

 

York CoderDojo joins other Dojos that run across North Yorkshire, encouraging more young people and teens to get coding and helps to put the power of computing and digital making into the hands of young people. 

 

Similar Dojos are run by other organisers in Harrogate and Selby, and the Keeping Digital Foundation are already working on running more frequent sessions at our Northallerton CoderDojo. 

 

We also want to thank our York CoderDojo volunteers for their commitment and hard work in running and attending these activities - we couldn't do it without your help! 

 

Here's to what has been a successful year for York CoderDojo and we can't wait for the exciting developments our second year of running these sessions will bring. 

 

People interested in finding out more about York CoderDojo can visit our website keepingdigital.org.uk/digital-making/york-coderdojo