On Saturday April 28th, CoderDojo@DCU kicked off with DCU graduate Noel King the Chief Mentor at the North Dublin Dojo. Together with CoderDojo mentor Ben Chapman and Mark Roantree from DCU's School of Computing, he has setup a new base on the Northside campus.

It kicked off with the children learning how to construct their first web page. Tutors (and parents) were there to ensure all went smoothly. At the end of the lesson, Noel ran a Q&A session with the children to ensure they understood the meaning of the "weird tags" and would be able to continue changing their web page until next week's Dojo.

We were delighted that Minister for Training and Skills, Ciarán Cannon TD, dropped in to see the launch of the North Dublin CoderDojo. DCU's president Brian McCraith was also there to lend support as Noel began the first lesson.

He was keen to stress the importance of "cool" when teaching younger students and hopefully enabling a new generation of techies. "As I have mentioned enough times we only teach what is cool and I am hoping to teach web application development and android development in DCU.  But it will be a little while before we get to this level". Noel was very clear on the targets for the first day: "At the end of week one every kid must have their first website."

There was advance publicity from Silicon Republic and all tickets were snapped up in advance of the event.

Tickets will be available online on Monday evenings, from 7pm onwards.

http://coderdojodcu.eventbrite.com/

There is also a Google groups website with all the latest information.

More images at: http://www.computing.dcu.ie/image-galleries/coderdojo-dcu-april-2012