CoderDojo – an investment in the digital future

12-year olds building apps more popular than Angry Birds … and it all began in Cork, Ireland

‘CoderDojo’ is a free, open source forum providing coding coaching for young people from age eight upwards, in programming and content creation.  It’s like a cross between the boy/girl scouts, martial arts, and programming.

CoderDojo was born about 9 months ago in Cork, Ireland, and has expanded rapidly from its small beginnings in an office building in the South East of Ireland.  Co-founded by James Wheldon, a 19-year-old whiz-kid programmer, and Bill Liao, a serial entrepreneur and venture capitalist, the CoderDojo movement relies on the free donation of space and time by the all-volunteer CoderDojo network.  As of March 2012, the CoderDojo movement gathers 2,500 kids every weekend in Ireland alone, at more than 20 locations across the country, to help them learn programming.

And it hasn’t stopped there.  In the last 3 months the movement has expanded internationally, and CoderDojo clubs have sprung up in about 15 countries worldwide, with the United States having the second largest number of CoderDojo clubs; other clubs are in London, Moscow, Tokyo, to name a few.

Coding languages, like any other, are best soaked up at an early age, and best appreciated among peers and through experience, rather than through the ‘teacher knows all’ methodology. According to one Coder Dojo organizer, Alan Clayton, that’s exactly what the movement encourages. “CoderDojo has one rule – Above all: be cool”, says Clayton.

The CoderDojo movement has already kicked off star successes like 12-year-old Harry Moran, who Apple recognized as the world’s youngest App Store developer via his “Pizza Bot” game app, a paid app which briefly topped Angry Birds in Ireland.

So what’s the connection between the international CoderDojo movement and Avego?  Several.  CoderDojo co-founder Bill Liao is an investment partner with Kinsale-based SOSventures (which is run by Avego’s Sean O’Sullivan); James Whelton met with Sean O’Sullivan just prior to the formation of CoderDojo, and subsequently James was taken on as a full-time Social Entrepreneur in Residence at SOSventures (enabling him to concentrate all his time on the CoderDojo open source/charitable effort).

But this movement didn’t just catch the attention of Sean O’Sullivan, it also caught the interest of Avego’s engineers and designers. Avego staff are looking to support the future wave of coders to take on their legacy, when the time comes. So, volunteering their time on a Friday evening after a frenzied week of digital jiggery pokery at the office, Avego’s kind-hearted programmers, generous team leaders and do-gooder designers are now found helping local digital natives construct games and websites out of original HTML, CSS and Javascript, in the cozy surroundings of a local country house hotel. In fact, Avego business coach Alan Clayton launched the Kinsale CoderDojo, which averages over 100 children and 40 adults & mentors every week.

As America’s Paul Harvey would have said, “… and that’s the rest of the story.”