Learnings from the April session

Well, it’s now a little over a month and one Dojo session after beginning our new review process and we have some more reflections:

1. Our first reflection (and it’s a little meta), is that it’s easier to make reflections than to implement change based on them! It will take us樂威壯
   a little while to build momentum on new initiatives and change doesn’t finish overnight. And some of our plans from last time were easier to implement than others. Last time I mentioned that we’re going to update the blog more often and – hurray – here’s another blog post. But a couple of our other plans fell apart a little at the April session. We’ve noticed that on the day, we tend to scramble initially, get our bearings somewhere in the middle, and become organized by the end. So we’re going to make more of an effort to get there well before the kids and make sure we’re in the right mindset when the morning rush begins. I suspect that this will be a gradual improvement for us over the next few sessions.
2. Our new mastery badges got positive reactions from kids and parents alike. We’re looking forward to more of that going forward. It is a new initiative for us though, so we’re still ironing out exactly how the process works. Do we award badges at the end of each session? At the beginning of the following session? Do we ask students to present at the end with the other presenters or do we have a separate set of presentations? Do we need more badges to recognize more varied skills? We’ll need to experiment a little to see what works best. By all means, feel free to let us know if you have thoughts on the matter.
3. On the topic of presentations: We love seeing kids show off their work, and we think it’s a great way to finish sessions. For so many reasons, we love the idea of presentations. But we’ve been noticing a general slump in momentum during presentations. We’re going to focus on this part of the session and fine-tune it over the course of the next few months.

We have regular meetups with the wonderful people who mentor with us at CoderDojo but if you attended a session recently and you have your own reflections, please share them with us. Comments below or on Facebook are great ways to let us know what you think. See you at the May session!