Everything Breakout Mentors does is structured for the long-term benefit of our students. We do not simply teach the same beginner level tutorial to everyone and shoo them out the door… (do you know any summer camps like that?)
Our goal is to adapt our materials and projects to grow with the student’s abilities. This allows us to stay with students for months and years, keeping their interest and constantly providing new challenges. The difficult part for parents is understanding this learning progress when they aren’t personally sitting in on the sessions.
That’s why we build software we call our Customer Portal. It handles recaps, tracking sessions, communication, and more to ensure everything runs smoothly.
Understanding Student Progress
With kids learning to code it can be tough to understand the progress of a student. It’s not always obvious.
For example, you can start with a very impressive game and simply change a couple graphics. Looks impressive, but no lasting learning there.
It is important what is going on under the hood, in the code itself. What concepts are the student using? How independent are they with their skills?
Each mentor will provide a written monthly recap to the parents. This shares what was accomplished in the last month, but also looks forward to what is coming next. Plus, mentors can share the softer skills they are working on with the student, beyond the coding concepts and projects.
The recap is an excellent touch point for parents to stay involved in their child’s education. Many parents use the recap as an opportunity to ask to see their son or daughter’s project. Parent encouragement can go a long way!
A Central Place to Track Everything
We built our own Customer Portal to keep track of the sessions, recaps, and bills.
It was an investment to provide this for our customers, but incredibly important for our long term students.
For the kids we work with for years, it contains incredible data. Parents can see how many hours they have spent coding with Breakout Mentors and the recaps as they advance from Scratch to Python, Java, or beyond.
The recaps and history will stay available even after your son or daughter is no longer an active student. We have even had students years later ask to see their recaps so they can include them in high school applications.
Smooth Communication
Each Breakout Mentors student has a regular day and time for their sessions. However, sometimes life gets in the way of even the best plans!
The Portal is our way of making communication easy as well. We can send automatic calendar invites for sessions and reminders. You can contact the mentor through our communication tools, or have their direct email and phone number. We believe the best method of communication is the one that works best for you, so give you plenty of options.
Important Goals Take Long Term Effort
That’s why we structure our mentoring as a one-on-one 90 minute session with the same mentor every week.
This means we work with a smaller number of students. That’s ok. Our goal is to have have a substantial impact on the kids we do work with.
The results speak for themselves – see our testimonials page!