Everything we do is structured for the long-term benefit of our students. Not simply teaching the same beginner level tutorial to everyone and shooing them out the door… know any summer camps like that?
Our goal is to adapt the materials and projects to grow with the student’s abilities. We aim to stick with our students for months and even years!
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?
We do monthly recaps to keep parents in the loop and to track the progress over the months and years.
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.
We will soon be adding some of the projects themselves so parents have permanent access to the code.
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!