We were about to start preparations for the 2015 Scratch conference and as I was psyched too, Andrea was invited the same day to participate … This was such a good example of a new hook to get a wider audience interested in beauty, joy and power of computing.

Turned out Andrea did participate at #Scratch2015AMS and together with her technical companion Michael Aschauer she led a full day master class at Waag in Amsterdam. I think it was here that Susan Ettenheim got excited.

As an organizer busy with a lot of tiny details, I missed it, and forgot about it till 2016 conference, now at MIT, where Susan and students were showing Andrea and the others how Turtlestitch had taken off in New York. That conference I met Susan's student Jennifer Lin, who not only enjoyed the Turtlestitch adventure but also blogged in great detail about her journey of learning.

Another year passed … Jennifer Lin was invited as special young guest of Scratch2017BDX, the conference in Bordeaux. Again Andrea joined the Scratch community and again the Turtlestitch web wove some new connections.

Personally I was impressed that Richard from (greater) Dublin decided that Turtlestitch was interesting enough to buy himself an embroidery machine. You know, he isn't teaching classes, just researching on learning of computational thinking.

Then in September 2017, I started as a teacher in Amsterdam …

Teaching CS in an Amsterdam highschool based on a business based curriculum quickly made me realize how valuable Turtlestitch (and some other ideas from Scratch conferences) are in real education. So I bought a second hand machine and did the elevator pitch with my principal, and then schoolyear 2018/2019 we had two embrodidery machine in the textiles department of our school.

Now working on finding holes in the curriculum to make space for Turtlestitching. The textile classes are for pupils aged 12-15 and my CS classes are an elective for those aged 15-18, so there's no natural fit.

Being a Montessori school we're very happy with the cards Jennifer created. They meet most of the Montessori standards (isolation of idea taught, self correcting, …) very nicely so we translated them to Dutch.