Looking for Mentors

Hi everyone, Im new to this group but am hoping you might be able to help me out with a project I am going to be running at my school this term. I am going to be delivering an introduction to programming for some Yr 9 students (13 - 14 year olds) starting out with basic programming ideas and examples and then moving onto a group project where teams of students create their own robots using robocode. They will have regular competition against each other to see what team is making the most progress / come up with the best ideas.

The reason I am telling you all this is that I am looking for some mentors to help out and perhaps give some advice. All this would involve is you perhaps receiving 1 or 2 emails with some code or some questions about how to do something. This kind of interaction is really useful for students as they get to work with real experts and feel like they are being listened to and treated like adults.

The project will run for about 6 weeks and will start mid february, as I said it would only involve a couple of emails or perhaps a Skype session. The classes are all small and the students are really hard working

I would be very grateful if you would consider helping out and if you have any questions please fell free to get in touch with me.

Thanks for your help,

Darren

I'm ready to help, but i'm afraid, that my english skill can become a problem

Thanks for the quick reply, its great to hear that people are keen to help out! I guess the best way to move forward would be to share some contact details. I will then give these out to the students once we start the robocode part of our project around the middle of february. Perhaps each of you could mentor a couple of teams therefore limiting the number of emails you will be getting.

It would be great if you could perhaps tell some other people about this project and see if they would also like to help our as the more people we have involved the better!

My email address is dsutton@nlcsjeju.kr, please email me from the account you would like students to contact you at so that I can start putting a list together.

Thanks again for your help and I look forward to hearing from you and perhaps some other willing helpers soon.

Darren

I'd also be glad to help. Projects like this are always interesting :)

actually i think that every active robocoder is ready to help. and there are google+ circle for robocode: https://plus.google.com/102023615133629629984/posts?fd=1

Thanks for the great response, I've had quite few replies and am also looking for mentors from other more general programming areas as well. If you think you might like to get involved please contact me and I can tell you all about it.

The students had their first programming lessons this week and are really excited, particularly by the idea of working with robocode and having mentors they will be able to contact and share ideas with.

If you have said you will be involved or would like to be can I ask you to send me a quick Bio about yourself and your experience that I can give to students so they can find out a bit about you. It would also be great if you could supply a picture as well and this could be an avatar if you like, It would be nice if students could put a name to a face!

Thanks again for all your help, if you know of anyone who might be willing and able to help please put them in contact with me.

Darren