Hack the Future is headed back to the Peninsula after holding their last couple events in San Jose. Come Saturday April 20th at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View for a full day of kids building with technology! There are many different stations set up which kids 5th through 12th grade can explore at their own pace. The diversity of the stations is impressive – various types of computer programming, electronics with soldering and circuits, and design fundamentals. Hack the [...]

The drag-and-drop programming environment Scratch can look like a children’s toy – it features little cartoon characters controlled by stacking blocks together. Yet it teaches many important programming concept like loops, conditionals, and variables (which we’ve written about before). We recommend our younger students to start with Scratch – they can continue with it to make more and more advanced projects rather than rushing on to a more traditional language like Java. It can be difficult to communicate the amount of [...]

In the past we’ve touched on the trendy buzz for “learning to code” and how people as diverse as Michael Bloomberg and will-i-am have jumped on the bandwagon. If you have people that are wildly successful in other disciplines (like business, politics, and music) that are spending their valuable time learning to program, it begs the question, should everyone learn to code? Ben Werdmuller had a great answer to this question on Quora that I’d like to share with you:   [...]

Silicon Valley Coder Dojo tickets go almost as fast as Taylor Swift’s. I’ve stopped sharing upcoming events with Breakout Mentors email subscribers because of mounting frustrations of never being able to obtain a spot. Today I bring you some good news – there are still tickets available for this Saturday’s event. It is a kids hackathon using the Khan Academy JavaScript platform – no experience is required and it is a great opportunity for students new to programming. The students will [...]

We are now several weeks into 2013. New Years Resolutions have probably been dropped by now, but how about your plan to help your kids pursue their interest in computer programming? There is no perfect time to start. All that free time you’re imagining in the future is an illusion. Are you planning on waiting until summer? With all the summer camps, vacations, and post-vacation recovery days, how are you going to squeeze it in? And even if you do, you [...]

There is a lot of activity in the teaching how to program space. Organizations and companies are continuously sprouting up – some are just for kids, some are geared towards high schoolers, and some are to get adults jobs. Even though I feel it is part of my job as the founder of Breakout Mentors to stay on top of the programming education space, there are so many that I can’t possibly do it. But there are some general trends amongst [...]

A CNN opinion article by Douglas Rushkoff went into the highlights of his speech to Congress during Computer Science Education Week. Here are some of my favorite points he made: 2. Programming a computer is not like being the mechanic of an automobile. We’re not looking at the difference between a mechanic and a driver, but between a driver and a passenger. If you don’t know how to drive the car, you are forever dependent on your driver to take you [...]

Parents want their kids to go to college for the job security a college degree provides. Unfortunately in recent years we have seen that a college degree alone does not guarantee employment. 30% of young graduates are unemployed or underemployed. Job security comes from having skills that are in demand by many companies. Not all businesses succeed, so part of security is that if the company you work for folds, you will easily join with another company. In a world where [...]

Frank is a Stanford senior studying Symbolic Systems that works with two Breakout Mentors students in both Java and Python. He teaches in Stanford’s introduction to programming course that is one of the most popular classes on campus, so he is definitely familiar with the problems that beginning programmers face! Frank also has impressive real-world programming experience having interned for Fog Creek Software and Microsoft, as well as doing research on filesystems for Stanford. Let’s get to know him! Why is [...]

One of the advantages of working with a programming mentor is that the student hears repeated use of programmer lingo. Words like function, method, parameter, return value, class, instance and property are used by the mentor when helping the student. This is much better than the student simply reading what they mean. The repeated exposure and conversations in this new “language” drives home the concepts. Self taught programmers may know how to program, but might struggle with the communication skills to [...]