Try out a Sushi Card

In order to reduce the workload for yourself and your mentors, you should make use of educational resources at your Dojo instead of trying to come up with projects yourselves, at least until the Ninjas start having their own project ideas! There are a lots of websites where you can find such materials, but the CoderDojo community and the CoderDojo Foundation produce freely available educational resources that are specifically designed for use in a Dojo.

You’ll also find out a lot more about educational resources, and how to use them in your Dojo, in Week 3 when we talk about planning your Dojo sessions and your year.

The CoderDojo resources site

You can find our collection of educational resources for a variety of programming languages and hardware projects on the CoderDojo resources website at coderdojo.com/resources.

Sushi Cards

Most CoderDojo educational resources are in the form of ‘Sushi Cards’ (bite-sized learning!). The original ones were created by CoderDojo mentor Clyde Hatter for use in his own Dojo, and his idea has since spread and become our educational format of choice. The aim, for those of us who author them, is to have one concept per ‘card’ — originally a two-sided A4 sheet, but nowadays equally likely to be a web page. With each card the Ninja completes, they learn something new about coding.

Try one out!

This week you can familiarise yourself with the basics of Scratch and the Sushi Card format by completing our beginner-level Scratch Sushi Cards. Check it out. You can learn more about Scratch by watching the video below. Let me know how you get on!

Try to add your own twist to the game you’ll make, and share it in the comments below!

What did you learn from completing the Sushi Cards? What would a Ninja need to know before they can complete them?