Open Badges at CoderDojo Scotland 1st October, 2013 What are Open Badges? The Mozilla Open Badges project issues digital badges to recognise skills and achievements. It allows you to display online real-world achievements and skills which may help with future career and education opportunities. The badges issued by the Open Badges project are digital indicators of skills learned inside or outside the classroom. This July, CoderDojo Scotland joined other companies like NASA and Disney-Pixar, and has become an Open Badge issuer. Designing our Open Badges Doug Belshaw from Mozilla joined us for an Open Badge designing workshop in Glasgow Science Centre. A dozen of our mentors who had indicated an interest in recognising achievement and education joined us for an afternoon of Open Badge design and implementation. Doug challenged us to think about what types of activities or skills should be represented by our CoderDojo Scotland badges. We looked at examples of existing Open Badges related to programming and digital making skills. For example, Mozilla offer Webmaker Open Badges that show skills in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Similarly, Codecademy are looking into converting their programming skill badges into the Open Badge format. We didn’t want to copy badges that are already out there, so we decided that rather than awarding badges for skill (for example in HTML, Scratch, or Python) our badges would recognise attitudes and behaviours that are specific to CoderDojo. In other words: “What can you do or learn at a CoderDojo that you don’t get from learning from a book or online portal?” Our Badge Choices With this in mind, our badges will centre around activities that are unique to the Dojos, you will be able to get a badge for team-coding (for example “working on a group project”), being a Good Neighbour (“helping someone debug their code”), or developing communication skills (“presenting your work to an audience”). Our badges will be platform and technology independent – we won’t specify what you need to use or how to make it. “Solve a real-world problem using code” is open enough that it could be attempted using any language. On our design panel, the industry mentors commented that seeing badges like this on a job resume would give them a better picture of the candidate than simply a list of skills and awards. Not all badges need lots of effort to be earned. For example, our first badge (titled Hello, CoderDojo) is awarded for attending one CoderDojo session. And if you come back for another, you’ve earned Return to the Dojo. (We don’t plan to offer any other badges for long-term attendance, as our sessions are monthly and it would take a while to come to 50 sessions!) Get Badging! We invite you to start using Open Badges to recognise the learning that happens in your CoderDojo – Hello, CoderDojo is available now for you to award at your next session. Email Craig at badges@coderdojoscotland.com to be sent a set to award to your participants.