This Coder Dojo thing (http://coderdojo.com/) has been slowly growing momentum for a while now, but has recently had a burst of activity, with setups in SF, New York and Boston on the way.

James, at 19, seriously has to be commended for the sheer dedication he's thrown behind this endeavour. Ben has also been behind the scenes for a long time, only 18 himself.

It's inspiring, and humbling, to know these guys are putting all their energy into helping kids learn how to code.

Thanks for the context, was a bit lost without it. Looks like a great idea.

Oo, name collision. http://codingdojo.org/

The "original" (FWIW) coding dojo was aimed at adults, but we've had something going where we code with kids as well, for a couple months now.

Do get in touch!

Hey man, James here, yeah the name collision is crazy, we saw it a few months in (we're around 9 months old now). We aim entirely at young people and are starting spin off that focuses retraining the unemployed (14% unemployment in Ireland at the moment, yet over 7000 vacancies in tech). In Ireland in particular and seemingly from many different countries, theres nothing there for young people interesting in coding and tech. We also have some cool stuff we're working on like merit badges and physical belts and we organise some events and such, we're also doing some stuff with GitHub and getting kickass people involved. It would be awesome to talk more and volunteer to teach some kids and vice-versa! My email is [email protected]

Annoying design requests follow: On coderdojo, increase the contrast between your flyout menus and the rest of your page. Make those big button looking links clickable or else lose the borders (I want to click the "button" but can't, whereas I know exactly what to target for regularly styled links.)

That aside, the effort is cool.

Cool, we're actually redesigning that entire site and hoping to have it up by Friday. Please drop back then and give an suggestions or advice! Thanks man :)

Hi James, I love what you're doing. Keep doing it with gusto!

I'm wondering, though, about those 7000 vacancies. Are those Irish tech jobs that are not being filled? What kind of jobs are these and where is the greatest need-- web dev, backend, security? Can you talk about that some more?

And still another name collision: http://www.codersdojo.com

This one also is concerned with Code Katas. See this post from Pragmatic Programmers: http://codekata.pragprog.com/

I got drunk with Ben last night!