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
Scratch For Kids Learning to Code
Many of our students begin with Scratch drag-and-drop coding to learn the fundamentals. Breakout Mentors currently is working with 24 kids in Scratch! Even though it is beginner friendly, it includes important concepts like loops, conditionals, and variables. Kids love to make their own versions of games, for example the classic game Space Invaders. Mentors encourage the students to add their own creative features, like speeding up the enemies after reaching 10 points.
As students progress, mentors are able to introduce more advanced concepts and encourage increasingly complex projects. Girls who work with Breakout Mentors over months and years will eventually move from Scratch to a language they type like Python or Java.
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
My son was interested in coding from a very young age. We have tons of books at home, however, only Breakout Mentors actually helped my son to build on his interest and develop some skills. The lessons are fun and introduce serious coding concepts in a way kids can grasp. My son started with making games in Scratch. Moving from little projects to bigger and more complex ones, he has learned the fundamentals and now is moving to Java. He shows me his work after each lesson since he is very proud of his accomplishments and can’t wait to show them off.
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.
What students say…
