Mentor.me

A platform offering FREE mentorship service to elementary and high school students who don't have access to tech education in school, creating a safe space for students to self-learn without judgment!

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Inspiration

Not everyone has access to tech education from childhood; some students only get access to programming courses later in high school and university, and students form historically underrepresented demographics may even experience further deterrents to pursue an education and/or career in tech. A 2018 survey of 1500 young Canadians showed that many Canadian students are interested in opportunities to learn coding, but only one-third actually had access to said opportunities through school. The same survey indicated that, though the boys and girls surveyed had around the same level of coding skill, only 28 percent of girls feel confident in their ability to code, compared to 41% of boys, and only 27% of girls are interested in a career in coding, compared to 50% of boys.

As university students studying Computer Science, we know first hand that self-learning is a perpetual journey that is at the core of our major, and it is absolutely crucial for students to build that confidence to learn at a young age. That's why we decided to make a platform to offer free tech mentorship to young students from underrepresented groups to encourage them to explore and self-learn coding skills without fear, so they can build their confidence and grow as they learn.

What it does

Mentor.me is a web application that connects to a database of volunteer mentors. The webapp retrieves information form the database and dispalys it, and is also able to add and delete mentor information.

How we built it

We built the webapp with a backend database hosted on MongoDB Cloud and frontend done with React.

Challenges we ran into

It was very difficult for us to figure out how to write the data into the database and have it stay with MongoDB. We also ran into many connection bugs and errors for reasons we still don't entirely understand. We also weren't really sure how to filter by categories and received help from mentor to successfully implement filter buttons on our application.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Completing a working web application with a front end connected to a back end!! We're also very happy we got one filtering function to work!

What we learned

We learned about how to work with Mongo Atlas clusters, how to use React and Node.js to facilitate connection between front and back end, as well as how to style the front end with CSS.

What's next for Find my mentor

We'd love to add a login and more filtering functionalities, as well as move certain functions to their own page. We also want to include an auto-update function.

Why we want to continue working on our project!

We want to continue working on our project because we are very passionate in our mission to address educational inequity. There are a lot more functionalities for us to add to our website that could improve user experience for students and mentors alike. We put a lot of hard work into our project, and we really hope it will make a difference.

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