About
Super Powers
Coding is a super-power.
Coder:LevelUp is helping fellow Africans learn this super-power.
Coding is a super power.
Levelling up in coding allows people to thrive, bringing economic prosperity and innovation.
That’s what we do at Coder:LevelUp - we level up coders in South Africa.
How are we growing community?
“the loop of joy: having an idea, struggling and then… it works! That’s the engine of creative learning, once this gets going we can’t stop the learning.” :David Campey
Coder:LevelUp helps grow coders and our coding community to be part of the change that sees 500 000 coders (digital makers) working in the Western Cape and beyond supporting the national goal of 1 million coders in South Africa.
- For children we have helped grow code clubs since 2012, run the coolest projects showcase, participate in the astro-pi challenge, growing school coding & robotics in partnership with the Raspberry Pi Foundation and in collaboration with schools, libraries and community centres.
- For pros through coderetreat deliberate practice days, devdev pro community of practice and the lean iterator in partnership with afrolabs, industry and the IITPSA.
We’ve trained hundreds of teachers, helped start 100+ clubs, grown coolest projects SA to 200+ participants in 3 cities, run code retreats regionally, nationally and internationally, supported hundreds of startups with Li and it feels like we’re just beginning.
Remove duplication
“#3: Remove duplication” Kent Beck’s Rules of Simple design
As programmers we have learned to value removing duplication, to encourage re-use, avoid bugs and duplicated effort.
Building a community, we are continually amazed at the power of connecting people doing similar things and unlocking value through collaboration.
Open-source, open community and open education initiatives like code club & coderetreat allow local efforts to collaborate in regional, national and global community of practice, sharing, learning and creating the world we want to live in.
“so powerful is the light oof unity that it can illumine the whole earth” Baháʼu’lláh
History
- 2012 First CoderDojo @ afrolabs
- 2012 First Code Retreat @ afrolabs
- 2015 First Lean(StartUp)Coffee @ truth
- 2016 Lean iterator programs kick off at GSB, Orbis, Stadard Bank.
- 2018 incorporation as LevelUp NPC allow us to better organise and collaborate with other orgs for our activities across kids, pros and startups.
- 2019 CoderDojo Growth Partnership
- 2020 IITPSA MOU to formalise the devdev working group.
- 2020 First Coolest Projects South Africa
- 2023 Raspberry Pi Foundation funded programme to grow Code Clubs in the Western Cape.
- 2024 Growth into Eastern Cape with ECDoE
- 2024 CoderDojo brand & code club brands merged into one global code club brand
- 2024 code club pilots with City of Cape Town Libraries building on unplugged coding
- …2048 BHAG: Community of 500k coders in the Western Cape, 1M in South Africa
Incorporation
LevelUp NPC, 2018/401659/08 incorporated in July 2018.
Directors: Roger Norton, Natalie Milne & David Campey.
Contact
info@coderlevelup.org