My Top 10 Tips for Mentoring Young Women while They Code
What a privilege it has been to be part of the Technovation Girls program at the University of Waterloo for the past two years! Every time I mention that I am a mentor for the program, I do so with a little bit of guilt because I gain so much from mentoring teams. It does not even seem like work. So far, I have mentored three teams, all of whom finished their projects. I have two more teams this year, and I am very excited to see their amazing ideas turn into cool mobile Apps.
Being a mentor is rewarding, and it can also be a challenge.
- Mentors for the Technovation program are hard to find as a rule (It’s almost always better when you have a partner).
- You usually do not know the skill-base of your teams and Tweens and Teens are not always open about how you can help. Sometimes you are lecturing them on something they know in spades; sometimes you forget key parts of the process.
- Even if you are an experienced coder, getting to learn Thunkable or MIT App Inventor can be hard on its own, forget helping non-coders figure it out.
- Deadlines are stressful! Do we really need to put 9–16 year olds through a crunch? (The answer is “no” and I hope my tips will help you avoid that.)
Since I have some experience being a mentor, I thought I would put out some of my learnings as part of the process and maybe it will encourage you to join in on a technovation program of your own! We are always looking for mentors and — working with another mentor is always beneficial
Without further ado, here are my top 10 tips for being a mentor.
- Focus on learning and perseverance.
Every young person is on their own journey with code. Some will go on to work as senior engineers at Google. Others will amaze their bosses by whizzing their way through an Excel spreadsheet. The Technovation website says their program “invites teams of young people from all over the world to learn and apply the skills needed to solve real-world problems through technology.” Building a cool app is a kind of “head fake learning” — we are making them build an app so they can learn more about coding and entrepreneurship (knowledge) and how to keep moving forward when things eventually go wrong (skills and perseverance).
See educator Randy Pausche talk on “Head Fake Learning” below:
As a mentor, your job is to keep encouraging your team to finish the project and remind them of what they are learning in the process. Point out the value of the things they are learning to do to the real world, and help them keep going when things are not easy.
- Save Every time you have something.
“Hello World!” is an app. Your home page is an app. You home page with a button to another screen is an app. Of course these early version apps are not going to win any major prizes, but they are something you can submit in a crunch. Every time you make an improvement on an app and it seems to have some kind of general cohesiveness, save it. Then tell your team that if something comes up (I usually say “if we all win 10 million dollars”) and no one can do anything else, you at least have something to submit.
- Constantly chat with your team and ask questions about their problem.
At the beginning of the program, your team should be working on ideation — what is the thing that they are trying to solve, and how is their app going to address that thing. This is usually an inspiring process, because it is based on the things that your team values the most. Often these things relate to big problems — homework stress, bullying in school, improving the environment , access to resources and so on. As a rule, the conversation about the problem is going to be something connected to your teams passions and is always a good conversation for you and your team.
By continuously chatting with them about their problem, you are helping your team get ready for the pitch. When they know their problem back and forth and from every angle, taking questions from judges should be a piece of cake.
- Limit Graphics Until March!
Graphic design is an exciting and fun part of designing an app. It is also a time suck and more often than not, most drawings do not make sense once the app starts to develop. Excessive images can also affect the user experience in unexpected ways, creating unexpected design problems.
Other than a simple draft logo, it is much better to focus on a basic skeleton of the app, with placeholders for images, rather than trying to build a whole collection of images for the app. If the team insists, suggest stick figures or very simple ugly drawings.
This tip is much harder than you might think! Young people love to make colour choices and do drawings! It can also be hard to conceptualize how an app will work if it does not have the pretty images. In my experience, judges are more impressed by straight-forward solutions and UX than they are an excellent drawing. If you suggest that the team can start doing graphics in March, it will be an excellent reward for getting the coding done early! It will also be very clear what kinds of graphics are needed and how they will be used.
- Constant and Specific Feedback
Say it like this: When you [something they did], I could see that [the effect of their behavior], [statement of encouragement or advice].
While this works for both negative and positive feedback, I’ve never found myself using it for negative with my teams. “When you showed Mara how to find the right database tool for the app, I noticed she got really excited to keep going! I think if you keep that up, we are going to have a really awesome app because we are working together.”
- Schedule One Phone Call with an Expert
As you likely know from your own work experience, asking for advice is a key life skill. Once you have a sense of who your users are, it can be really beneficial to ask your team to make up 3–5 simple questions and then schedule a phone call with someone who understands the problem very well. Finding people out in the field who are encouraging to entrepreneurs will help build confidence in your team to think about entrepreneurship as well.
- Don’t Touch the Keyboard!
As a former public librarian, who has taught many a person young and old how to work a computer, I know more than anyone the level of frustration that builds up as you try to explain to someone how to do something on a computer.
Commit to not touching the app while you are with your team. Find yourself an hour to figure out whatever problems on your own instead, and then come back with some notes on what they need to do. But don’t touch the keyboard while they are in the room! Let them do the work. If it helps, go back and read bullet point #1 (Focus on Learning and Perseverance).
- Finish each meeting with no more than three actions.
Young women from ages 9–16 already have lots of homework, and really important other stuff, like friends, and play. It’s not always the case that extra homework helps improve learning anyway. If there is work to do in between meetings, it’s much more important to focus on the quality of the work, rather than how much work gets done.
Three actions are easy to remember. It may be helpful to think about the actions the same way you think about your home and how things like accumulated dishes, laundry or garbage causes a bottleneck that keeps other housework from being done. Any homework you suggest should be the sort of thing that opens up your team to accomplish tasks. Things like “Sketch out a screen to show how the login screen will work” is much better than “build the login screen by next week.”
- Celebrate!
If your team has touched Thunkable in any way, they have already accomplished more programming knowledge than a very large part of the population. If they have describe their app to their brother or sister in a way that is understandable, they have accomplished something that a very large part of the population struggles with.
High fives and fist-bumps are probably your biggest tool as a mentor. Don’t let haters with their “participation trophies are a scourge on society blahdeblahdeblah” get to you. Coding, pitching, designing, UX testing etc. are real accomplishments with real value attached to them. Find ways to celebrate!
- Be Amazed!
You may not be able to help but follow this tip, but I thought I’d add it anyway. What your team will accomplish will amaze you. I’ve seen plenty of live pitch events and what the technovation participants accomplish has no shortage of amazing moments. I’ve found myself thinking more than once that the young women in the technovation program could accomplish just about anything in the working world. It’s like they only need the opportunity!
That the end of my tips. If you are a technovation mentor, please share your own tips about how to mentor. If you are not a technovation mentor, please consider joining the program. The program can always use more mentors and, like I said, you usually do find yourself gaining more than you put in.
