Summer is an excellent opportunity for kids to code — more hours are available to discover new interests or dive into passions. Kids coding summer camps are extremely popular, however you don’t want a one-size-fits-all camp. It should be personalized to ensure they learn and have fun.
Our year-round mentoring pairs each kid with an impressive college instructor for weekly 90 minute sessions. Our curriculum, constantly improved since 2011, is the perfect blend of structure and open-ended projects for independence and grit.
During the summer we offer a personalized camp option to accelerate the learning. These are 3 hours per day with a private instructor, whether one-on-one or with a couple friends.
Hear From a Student
Provide Your Daughter a Female Role Model
There is a proven drop off in girls’ interest in coding as they get older. According to Girls Who Code, 66% of girls ages 6-12 are interested, 32% ages 13-17, and just 4% entering college. The best way to sustain interest is with a female role model and continuous personalized learning opportunities.
Breakout Mentors is currently working with 27 girls learning to code. In our Girls Coding Academy each girl is paired one-on-one with a female mentor excited to share her passion with the younger generation!
Girl Students
Paired With
Female Mentor
If Preferred
Coding for Advanced Girls Kids
Many Breakout Mentors 8 to 11 year-old students are too advanced for the typical kid coding classes and camps. They find each offering just goes over the same things, never advancing beyond the basics. Or when covering tougher material, it is in a cookie-cutter, plug-and-play manner.
Most kids who start with Breakout Mentors will first solidify their fundamentals through making games in Python or Java. Once they have mastered the basics, the sky is the limit. The one-on-one mentoring format is perfect for personalization and challenging advanced kids. Some Breakout Mentors students with the help of their mentor have focused on:
- iOS, Android, or web apps with complex backend functionality
- Unity for 3D game programming and Virtual Reality projects
- Arduino for circuits and Internet of Things projects
- Competition programming at USACO platinum level (see our USACO Competition Programming Academy)
- Low-level C programming to make own programming language and compiler
- Self-study for the AP Computer Science test (see our Computer Science Track)
- Data science projects using NBA and other sports data (see our Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence Academy)
What exciting focus will your son or daughter dream up?
What parents say…
Breakout Mentors did a wonderful job matching my daughter with a mentor – she is perfect! My daughter told me that she learned more from one session than her last 3 summer camps combined. She was so excited! Thank you – this is exactly what we were looking for!
Mother of 12 year old girl in Palo Alto
Breakout Mentors was exactly what I was looking for. We started 2 years ago when my daughter was 11 and now she is an expert Scratch coder which translated easily into learning Python! Her mentors don’t tell her what to do, they help her figure it out. They push her to make her projects better and more complex. They treat her like a peer and do things like white boarding sessions and have passionate discussions about programming logic during her sessions. Both of her mentors have been women, which has been amazing. And an added benefit is she loves going to the CAL engineering library every week, wants to be an engineer and attend MIT! It’s ignited her passion about STEM subjects and she is so driven now. This program is truly amazing. I can’t say enough good things about it.
My son just received notification that he has been placed in AP Computer Science – Data Structures, the top class at his school. We are thrilled. Thanks to Breakout Mentors for all of their expert mentoring and prep work. It all paid off!
What students say…
