Breakout Mentors — Austin Area Kids Coding with University of Texas Mentors

It varies greatly by student age, experience level, and learning pace. The aim of the tracks is to deeply understand the programming concepts and problem solving skills required in coding. It isn’t a checkbox curriculum: just a shallow introduction to many concepts. We encourage our mentors and students to extend projects by adding new features and creative touches. This give students the experience of brainstorming, formulating a plan, translating it into code, and troubleshooting. They’ll see the patterns in how to organize code to plan ahead and allow future features. And they’ll finish projects they are proud of, which keeps them motivated to continue learning!

The typical student might spend the first year on the Coding Fundamentals Track and the second year on the Computer Science Track. However, it isn’t a goal to finish quickly. For students who still need more practice with the fundamentals, but can handle more abstract concepts, we can bring some of that in earlier. We have a lot of experience from years of working with students how best to challenge them to keep advancing.

The secret to our success is our team of 50+ talented mentors. We hire Computer Science students at top colleges like Stanford and UC Berkeley. Each mentor goes through a rigorous vetting process to ensure they are the right fun and engaging personality match for working with kids. Our hiring process emphasizes innate tutoring instincts and then new mentors are put through our thorough training to make them even better. We know you’ll be wowed by your mentor, which is why we make the first session risk free!

Yes, absolutely! We work with many complete beginners who may benefit from a one-on-one mentor as their first coding experience. Some kids learn at a different pace, others want the personal connection, and plenty just want to make sure the initial experience is amazing. Our goal is to adjust the curriculum to the student’s age, skill level, and interests, we have perfected our approach and curriculum for the last decade!

We caution parents to not think of coding concepts in isolation. Too many courses introduce one concept at a time and demonstrate it with short 5 line programs. Learning to code involves the concepts as building blocks, yet the hard part isn’t grasping how that individual building block is used. It is actually putting it into practice and being able to combine it with other concepts to achieve the desired result.

Our students learn all the important coding concepts as they are ready: loops, conditionals, variables, and functions. Arrays and other basic data structures, object-oriented programming, recursion, and more. However, it isn’t a theoretical understanding of these concepts. From day one our students write code from the ground up and start to work on larger code bases. The mentor assists with the many critical thinking skills necessary beyond the individual concepts, like planning ahead in game design and troubleshooting when things go wrong.

At Breakout Mentors the first session is risk free with a satisfaction guarantee. If you don’t feel it is a fit, we will issue a 100% refund. We put a lot of effort into determining the mentor who is the right long-term fit, so want families who are committed to continuing if we deliver a great experience. That’s how we differ from some of our competitors — we don’t advertise a free trial, only to have one teacher do the trial class, then switch to someone else.