Breakout Mentors — San Diego Area Kids Coding with UCSD Mentors

How long does it take to become good at playing the piano? Or doing mathematics? An even tougher question: what is the overall goal of education? In short, everyone learns at different speeds and our goal is to challenge at the perfect pace for each student. That means thinking of it as a long-term goal and understanding the long-term result is worth the effort. We find the more the student achieves in their coding education, the more valuable the sessions become! We are able to move towards intermediate projects with hundreds of lines of code or really dive into a complex CS concept to demonstrate the power and simplicity it provides. So we hope that our students don’t stop learning at an arbitrary point that is “good enough”. However, we also understand the need for external markers and goals. For example, we work with students to be ready for AP CS A or to participate in a coding competition. In these cases, we can drive towards those goals and provide assessments on time estimates.

Breakout Mentors can work in almost any programming language and we are always open to special requests. We have had students use Scratch, Python, Java, Code.org drag-and-drop, JavaScript, HTML/CSS, C++, C, Unity, Godot engine, iOS Swift, and probably some more I’m forgetting!

However, the majority of our students want our recommendation for the best programming language for them, which is often Python. It is important we stick with one rather than bounce around, since the language isn’t as important as learning the logic: understanding the flow of the code with loops, conditionals, variables, and functions. 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.

The secret to our success is our team of 50+ talented mentors. We hire Computer Science students at top colleges like UC San Diego. 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!

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 skills necessary beyond the individual concepts, like planning ahead and troubleshooting when things go wrong.

It varies greatly by student age, experience level, and learning pace. The aim of the San Diego area kids coding tracks is to deeply understand the 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.