Taking 'make and do' to a new level in computing

Young entrepreneur James Whelton is developing CoderDojo, a movement of computer clubs for kids that started in Cork last year and has now gone global, running from New York to Tokyo, writes CLAIRE O'CONNELL

JAMES WHELTON bounds down the stairs and jogs towards me, smiling, his arm outstretched for a handshake. He’s not late for our meeting – in fact he’s a little early – but the 19-year-old just seems full of energy and enthusiasm.

That could explain a bit. Like how before he had even finished school he set up a company – he recalls going to meetings with Enterprise Ireland wearing his school uniform – he gained recognition as a programmer and hacker, spoke at a major conference and set up a successful computer club.

Today, he’s working with investment companies in Ireland and the US and he’s developing CoderDojo, a movement of computer clubs for kids that started in Cork last year and has now gone global, with Dojos running from New York to Tokyo.

One of the drives is to create the next generation of creators rather than consumers, explains Whelton when we meet at his base in Dogpatch Labs in Dublin, a technology company accelerator run by Polaris Venture Partners.

“As technology consumers, a lot of the time we are sandboxed and it’s difficult to see how to create things,” he says. “And if you want to something completely new and spontaneous it’s a lot more powerful to be able to code.”

Whelton wasn’t even born when the ZX Spectrum and the Commodore were all the rage in the 1980s, but he tells me he researched how booklets came with computers on how to make games.

“To do anything you used to have to know how to programme,” he says. “But now everything is done for you.”

From Cork, Whelton spent his pocket money as a kid on coding books and taught himself programming. By his mid-teens he was a freelance web designer.

“Some kids cut the grass, I was making websites for people,” he says. “Then I looked into doing iPhone apps, but there was nowhere to learn this stuff.”

Still, he figured out to hack an iPod Nano in his final year at school. That “went viral” as he describes, and earned him an invitation to speak at the Dublin Web Summit last year to talk about the experience.

Meanwhile, Whelton and his friends were having fun on Twitter, creating a bot that would find people tweeting about the Leaving Cert and tweet how long was left until the exams started.

Prompted by the interest, he decided to set up a computer club at his school, which was an instant hit. And once the Leaving Cert was done, he met entrepreneur and philanthropist Bill Liao and they co-founded CoderDojo, where kids could come along with their parents and learn how to code in free sessions where mentors are on hand to help.

“I had a meeting with Bill at the train station in Cork,” recalls Whelton. “I told him about the computer club and in my mind it was this big social thing of how young people have lack of access to computer coding. Bill identified that in the economy there was a drastic lack of developers, so we started cracking ideas together about creating a place where people could come and learn and make friends, and we came up with CoderDojo. It wasn’t just your standard class where there’s A to B file transfer, there would be interaction and you get to learn, practice and show off. The one rule we have – above all be cool – trickles down, it’s a look on behaviour and activity, and that was our core message with it.”

And why the name? Coder explains itself and Dojo is a Japanese term that loosely refers to a space for learning. Plus, as Whelton points out, the the Twitter handle and dotcom were free.

The sessions started at the National Software Centre in Cork then quickly spread to Dublin, where the Science Gallery and Dublin City University are now among the hosts, and on around the country. Whelton was also getting requests from overseas and today there are around 70 regular Dojos running in Ireland and around the world.

Famous alumni include Cork student Harry Moran, who at age 12 developed a successful iPhone app called PizzaBot. And as the parent of a Dojo-er, I can attest that the model works: my nine year old started happily building her own website after just one session and each week she reminds me to book us in for the next one.

So why is this computer club from Cork gripping the globe now?

“Clubs that ran in the past failed for a couple of reasons, maybe there was a fee, there could have been an entry barrier, maybe it was the way that they taught,” muses Whelton.

“In CoderDojo there are a lot of things being done differently – some computer science courses do an hour of lectures where you are expected to write it down on paper and then do an hour in the lab. But in CoderDojo you learn as you do.”

CoderDojos are free, with hosts or sponsors covering the running costs, so is there a business model here?

“It’s entirely open source and about transparency, it’s a community-driven thing,” says Whelton. “From day one, we wanted to keep money out of it. Money is a headache and often it can poison things.”

In the early days, when the CoderDojo was still relatively small, Whelton had been developing a product for monitoring and analysing social media through his company Disruptive Developments Ltd.

“We jumped through all of the standard start-up hoops, and Enterprise Ireland had supported us,” he says. The company got offers of seed funding, but a trip to the US changed Whelton’s perspective.

“I got meetings in Foursquare, Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter. Everybody was incredibly into and I could see there was such potential internationally, so I decided to take the focus away from the company and to work on CoderDojo full time.”

Whelton soon realised that working full time with no source of income was unsustainable, but SOS Ventures in Cork stepped in.

“They offered me a position as social entrepreneur in residence, which would essentially give me a way into working on CoderDojo and doing some freelance stuff on the side.”

Since then, Whelton, who deferred a place in computer science at University College Cork, has also started working with with US company Resolute Venture Capital, and he’s just back from an Asian tour where he attended a CoderDojo in Tokyo and spent some time visiting hacker spaces and accelerators in China. “They were extremely into the idea,” he says.

Keeping that many plates spinning means putting in the hours, but skateboarding, hanging out with friends and the odd riff on a bass guitar help to keep Whelton on an even keel.

“I keep the bass guitar next to my desk, so if it ever gets pretty stressful or I want to clear my head and think about something else, I play,” says Whelton.

He also pushes himself to complete side projects. “I sometimes give myself a challenge to build a complete product or service in 10 hours.”

But that what ultimately keeps him going is the impact of what he has set in motion.

“It’s seeing kids who just enjoy it, seeing what the mentors put in and hearing reports back,” he says.

“And I know from growing up how terrible it is growing up not having something like this. I wasn’t academic, I wasn’t sporty, computers were my thing and it was about finding somewhere to fit in.”

James Whelton is scheduled to talk at the dot conf conference on June 15th at the National College of Ireland, see  thedotconf.wordpress.com/