Welcome to CoderDojo Schöneweide

In March this year, I first heard about CoderDojo Schöneweide and thought to myself, “Why not?” They wrote that workshops could be used to introduce children and young people to technology, and that they were always looking for people to enrich their team. Since I had already helped out in this area in the past, I was immediately sure I wanted to stop by — especially since I hoped to learn something new myself.

So at the beginning of April I went to my first meeting and found out for the first time that you could take this as an AWE course at HTW. It had actually been mentioned in the email, but I hadn’t really registered it until then. Once there, I quickly realized how much fun this could be, and signed up for the course on short notice.

Getting started

Now that I was in the AWE course, the first few Wednesday meetings were all about onboarding: an introduction to how mentoring works, how CoderDojo itself is structured, and of course training on child and youth protection.

How do you even design your own workshop?

After that came the fun part: helping out with workshops or designing one of your own. Together with two fellow students, I decided to design a workshop of our own as a team of three — on a simple and well-known platform: Canva. Over the following weeks, we worked out what we actually wanted the children to learn with us and which tasks would best help us achieve that. The more experienced mentors at the Dojo supported us brilliantly the whole time. One Saturday in June, we finally got to run our workshop with the kids! Over lunch afterwards, we reflected on our experience together right away. In the weeks that followed, up until the end of the semester, we summed it all up in a short presentation and a brief report.

AWE takeaway

Looking back, taking the AWE was one of the best decisions of my last semester! It was incredibly fun to try out our own ideas with the kids and see how enthusiastic they were about it. From day one, you’re warmly welcomed and fantastically supported by the whole Dojo team. So if you want to step outside your everyday student life and do something hands-on, this is the place for you.

Sounds good?

If you’d also enjoy teaching children and young people more about a topic in tech, design, or similar fields, feel free to stop by, or sign up for the AWE “Designing Digital Education for Children”!