Raspberry Pi Partners With CoderDojo To Accelerate Youth Coding

CoderDojo and Raspberry Pi have joined forces in an attempt to get more young people into coding and teach them how to innovate with technology.

Although there will be no significant changes to the running and set-up of the two foundations, they will work closely together to provide support and share educational materials and resources.

Raspberry Pi CEO Philip Colligan will join the board of the CoderDojo Foundation, while CoderDojo’s Co-Founders, Bill Liao and James Whelton, will become members of the Raspberry Pi Foundation.

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CoderDojo is a global network of coding clubs for kids aged seven to 17 and is currently running in 69 countries after starting in 2011.

The young people – or ‘ninjas’ as they’re called – who attend the 1,250 CoderDojos around the world are taught programming skills with the support of mentors, similar to Raspberry Pi’s Code Clubs which attract around 75,000 attendees across the UK.

The partnership will create “the largest global effort to get young people involved in computing and digital making”, with the goal of quadrupling the number of CoderDojos worldwide to 5,000 by the end of 2020.

The Raspberry Pi Foundation will also provide practical, financial, and back-office support to the CoderDojo Foundation.

“CoderDojo is one of the most important global movements to help young people learn how to get creative with technology,” said Philip Colligan, chief executive of the Raspberry Pi Foundation.

“I’ve seen first hand the enormous impact that CoderDojo has had already, and I am thrilled that we’re joining forces to bring the power of computing and digital making to even more young people.”

Raspberry Pi celebrated its fifth birthday earlier this year with the launch of the Zero W PC, which boasts 802.11n wireless LAN and Bluetooth 4.0 connectivity for the princely sum of $10 (£8).

Its predecessor, the Raspberry Pi Zero, sold out in just 24 hours when it was released in November 2015 and the organisation has since gone from strength to strength.

It extended its reach into teacher training with the launch of a free magazine called ‘Hello World’ at education technology expo Bett in January, shortly before announcing a partnership with Google to bring artificial intelligence to the pocket-sized PCs.

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