Project FOOBAR Mentor Recruitment

Written by Nick Whitford
July 12, 2021

We are putting the call out to all Hamilton development professionals to act as mentors for Mohawk College Software Development students as we work through our first ever student-run open source project. You will be helping students with specific project-related Github tickets and can work around your schedule.

As a mentor, not only are you helping to grow the Hamilton development community, but you will get exclusive access to the next batch of software development students who could help your company grow after they graduate from school!

What is Project FOOBAR? Project FOOBAR is an opportunity for students in Mohawk’s software development and networking programs to gain experience working on building and deploying an application while also helping their community. In this case, we’ll be building a game that will introduce elementary school students to a computer programming topic not often covered by other games: logic gates. [GATE HOPPER] (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1N6F3SoGLlpuaRyIN1mJzzHHQk2hD4xlzw1VyUjPQiEU/edit) is a game where 2 animated characters (representing 0 and 1) run through a given logic gate (XOR, AND, etc.) and the student has to choose the correct output. The game can scale with difficulty with more inputs and more concurrent logic gates, and could also be constrained by time (10 seconds to get the right answer).

Current GitHub Tickets: [Click here to view the current list of Github tickets students are working on] (https://github.com/the-new-developers/gatehopper/issues)

Tech Stack We Are Using: JavaScript (possibly a JS library like p5.js) HTML CSS Deployment - Github Pages

How can you get involved as a Mentor?

As a mentor, you have a few options around how you can help:

Work 1:1 with a student as they take on a specific ticket Hold “office hours” where you make yourself available via Discord/Zoom/some other video conferencing app and students can jump in to ask you questions Keep an eye on our ‘foobar-text’ channel in our Discord server to answer any questions that may come up Keep an eye on the issues/tickets and PRs in Github

Students will be assigning themselves to tickets on GitHub, but how they connect with you as a mentor is completely up to you. You can decide which option you are most comfortable with:

A TND executive will personally introduce you to a student through email (or another medium, such as Discord, depending on your preference) when a student reaches out to us. With this method, we will not post your email anywhere. However, we can also post your email in our Discord server or on our website if you would prefer to have students reach out to you directly We can post your Discord or Slack handle and have students slide into your DMs A combination of any of the above!

We really appreciate you taking your time to share your knowledge with the next generation of developers.

From all mentors, we ask that you email a short bio (couple lines about the work you do and the types of tickets you would like to help students with) and your preferred communication method (outlined below) to newdevelopers@mohawkcollege.ca.

If you have any questions please let us know at newdevelopers@mohawkcollege.ca.

We don’t anticipate any issues but if anything does come up please don’t hesitate to contact us at newdevelopers@mohawkcollege.ca and an executive will assist in handling the situation.