Mentor Young Coders in Richardson

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Mentors develop positive, encouraging relationships with students at Bold Idea program sites and serve as role models to support students’ career aspirations in technology. Mentors challenge students to collaborate and to solve any problems they encounter.

Volunteers should have:

• Great listening skills
• An ability to communicate with others, including young students, volunteers and parents
• Patience
• Flexibility and openness to new ideas
• An ability to problem solve
• Punctual and reliable
• A sense of humor
• Empathy to the learning process
• An enjoyment for being around young students and can respect them as people

Note on coding experience: While we don’t require mentors to have a background in coding, we encourage volunteers to learn the material as the students are learning. You may even find that diving into the computer science concepts and programming languages in your own time makes you are a stronger mentor - and programmer.

We will depend on mentors to:

• Support a team of 10 students each week, alongside other mentors, offering encouragement, guidance and new ideas
• Prepare for each meetup in advance by reviewing pre-planned activities and even practicing them yourself, anticipating any student questions
• Get excited about student achievement and invested in their development during the semester-long course
• Coordinate with the Program Site Coordinator to track student progress
• Demonstrate behavior and a positive attitude that others should model

Support:

• Required two-hour training for new and experienced mentors
• Program Site Coordinator
• Bold Idea Wiki, a collaborative knowledgebase
• Connection with other volunteer mentors through Bold Idea’s Slack channel

Benefits of volunteering:

• Develop skillset in education, programming and leadership to support career goals
• Network with professionals in the technology industry
• Learn computer programming by teaching it
• Support the delivery of Bold Idea’s mission to develop and empower young minds to execute bold ideas as a team through the power of technology
• University and high school students can acquire service hours