CoderDojo Life #5 - Collaboration with Unicef to program for children's rights 💪

Combining children's rights and programming in one day. As much as 70 kids came together to be introduced to basic children's right through the creation of several games. In one amazing afternoon these kids learned a lot about two different worlds which came together perfectly. I would like to take you on a tour through an extraordinary collaboration between CoderDojo and Unicef!

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👉 New series started! 👈

Before we get started, I would like to tell you that I've decided to keep these blogs about teaching children to program going as a series! This is the 5th post so I will be numbering them from here on out. Definitely check out my previous posts on this subject!

👉 #4 Teaching Children To Code Without Code! CoderDojo Unplugged
👉 #3 Last Year We Taught 1024 Children To Program At The Same Time!
👉 #2 Worldwide Free Coding Clubs For Kids | CoderDojo Above All, Be Cool!
👉 #1 Teach Your Children To Code! Are They Prepared For The Black Box...

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Why Unicef and CoderDojo?

CoderDojo and Unicef collaborated on a unique event: Programming for children's rights. Because, the right for education is a key thing which connects Unicef and CoderDojo. On Sunday November 19th, this came into reality in Rotterdam (The Netherlands) when kids aged 7-17 worked all day to build games in Scratch. This day also connected well with the international children's day, which is held worldwide and annually on November 20th. Around this day there are events worldwide to remind us about special rights for children.

CoderDojo is an organization who aims to teach children about programming, a subject still missing in most elementary en secondary schools. We do this because we know how important it is to give children the opportunity to develop in the early stages of their life. The ideals of Unicef fit seamlessly on this and add the wish that every child should be able to bé child. Finally, both CoderDojo ánd Unicef are here, unconditionally and worldwide, for every child.

What did we do?

The list of special rights for children is pretty long. We decided to pick out 2 and use those a theme for building a game. To keep it as accessible as possible we chose to work with Scratch, which is a very easy and low key way to get into programming. The rights we used where:

• Right for clean drinking water
• Right for identity

Using these we came up with 2 games. The first would be to collect glasses of water, which would come up out of a little stream. The second would be made out of a maze in which the player had to find it's way to collect several passports in order to be able to exit the maze. This way the children were made aware of these special rights and at the same time learn about programming and the fact that they themselves had access to the right for education.

👉 Check out all those happy faces! 👈

This is a short after-movie which gives a good feel for that day.
But before you go, please take a moment to think about these questions 🙃:

❓ Are you or your children aware of these special rights?
❓ What are you doing to prepare your children for the digital society?

✏️ Let me know in the comments!

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📷 All pictures have been released from copyright
by their photographers so we can use them in publications like this.

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Thanks for reading!
Feel free to follow me and stay up to date on more activities by CoderDojo
to get children into programming and technology.

In case you are wondering who I am,
feel free to give my #introduceyourself a read :).