Getting Mentors out of Comfort zone

[GreyingJay]

Originally Posted by M3NT0R

So how was that experience? Since you were new, were you freaked out about mentoring a student? I've somewhat done this before, but I wonder if I need to be there with both the new mentor and the student to make the mentor feel comfortable.

I settled into it very easily, but though I am new to FRC mentoring I do have tons of experience working with teenagers through another organization I volunteer with, a summer camp.

I would say that if your new mentor is comfortable working with and communicating with teenagers, and humble enough to be able to say to a student "You know, I don't actually know the answer, let's find out together", then it should be fine. That's literally what we would do. We'd find stuff on wpilib or Google searches. Having experience with Java, I picked up on things a little quicker than he did and I was able to explain basic concepts as we went along. I don't think I was ever more than a step or two ahead of him but it was enough to get us both up to speed quickly.

I count it as one of my "wins" that, on bag and tag day, at 11:30pm, we needed to test one last thing before we bagged the robot, and he was able to write the program we needed from scratch, under time pressure from everyone on the team. That was a proud moment for both of us!

This setup also allowed the lead software mentor to focus his attention on several of the more experienced programmers, making his job easier too. A third mentor focused on other aspects of the code and worked directly with two students. I guess we essentially split the group so each mentor focused on 1-3 students for the entire time. I think this worked well.