Mentor Notes
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Requirements
Schedule
Here's a rough schedule, which you can adapt to suit your cohort. You should also schedule at least one short break in the afternoon for prayers. Parcel out the sessions between volunteers in a planning call beforehand. Once you've planned it, make sure you share the schedule with all trainees and volunteers at least 24 hours beforehand, so they can make any necessary travel, childcare, religious, and other logistical arrangements.
Morning
| 10:00 AM | 10:30 AM | 11:00 AM | 11:30 AM | 1200:00 AM | 12:30 AM |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Telephone | CYF Blocks | CYF Blocks | Ship It | Lunch | Lunch |
Afternoon
| 13:00 | 13:30 | 14:00 | 14:30 | 15:00 | 15:30 | 16:00 | 16:30 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Delivery | Ship It | CYF Blocks | Ship It | Personal Development | Personal Development | Wrap Up | Wrap Up |
Telephone
See week 1 for notes.
Coursework review/ Blockers
At the beginning of the lesson, get the students thinking about questions that they had during the week. To avoid getting distracted with answering a question for too long, run a short session where you write down all the questions on a whiteboard.
You can then prioritise answering the questions on your own time, or split into groups to answer several questions at once.
It is also useful to get a volunteer write up the questions in a more permanent place (e.g. as a Gist) and share on Slack.
We always begin our day with live coding and group debugging using trainees' work as material. This session is an opportunity to work through common problems with coursework and also to demonstrate productive code review and debugging strategies. Use Devtools where possible and live code.
Shipping it
Today is all about developing and shipping code and practising working together with others to get this done. Trainees don't need to make loads of progress, necessarily, but they need to ship and they need to witness and practise strategies for making progress. Prioritise asking questions, pairing, breaking down problems, and organising solutions. Some ideas:
- Set timers and do some physical stretches in between focused working bursts
- Mentors, work on your own Blocks (bring something!) projects and pair with trainees through the day
- Share resources like MDN, CSS Tricks, W3C, and Devtools frequently
Wrap up
We ask trainees to think together about what software developers really do. Share a Jamboard or FigJam and ask them to fill it with their ideas. Put a couple of starter notes on the board yourself.
It's really common for trainees to write millions of different things on one sticky note. Keep picking them up on this and ask them to put just ONE thing on each note.
Here are some important ideas you should bring up if the trainees do not:
- Software developers... work together in pairs, teams, and organisations
- Software developers... break down problems
- Software developers... do not just carry out tasks, they discover and define those tasks
- Software developers... don't know all the answers, they ask lots of questions
- Software developers... are not told what to do, they tell computers what to do
- Software developers... ship it
Sample reflection for mentor
Becoming a software developer is not about learning syntax, though you do have to learn syntax. It is not about following instructions, though you do have to carefully read and interpret requirements. Software development is fundamentally about solving problems by breaking them down into simpler, easier problems, solving them, and then organising those solutions into a logical sequence.
This is called computational thinking.
Assigning Coursework
At the end of Class, assign the homework for this week through Google Classroom.