Texas Youth in Technology

(funded by a grant from the Texas Workforce Commission)


Mentor Responsibilities

The first and foremost responsibility of a mentor is to encourage and support less-experienced students so as to help them become reasonably confident and capable computer science majors. This is primarily accomplished throubh lab support and individual tutoring. Ideally, a good mentor will take extra steps to make students feel like they are not alone in their struggle to master the early computer science courses. (If mentors wish to organize a more social interaction with their students, they should feel free to contact Dr. Hartness if they need any help.)

In order to ensure that we have a good supply of new students to support in CS 146, mentors will be asked to help with another purpose of the grant, namely to encourage high school students to start preparing for a technology-related major and recruit new students into the CS major. Visiting high schools, manning a booth during Saturday at Sam, and helping to develop recruiting materials are all part of this effort. Also, we hold a high school counselor workshop and a high school teacher workshop that can also benefit from the support of our mentors.

If you have extra time, say at the start of the semester, consider seeing if you can improve any of these presentation materials (coordinate with other mentors so you don't duplicate each others work):
careerpaths.ppt
mathInCS.ppt
mathInCS2.ppt
teachers-students.ppt
nerdy.ppt
teacher-careers.ppt
Robocode.ppt