Mentoring with Cybermentor

This post ended up being a lot longer than I anticipated, so feel free to skip sections you are not interested in!

I have been mentoring as a part of the program Cybermentor for almost two years now. Cybermentor is a program specifically designed for women to mentor school aged girls in STEM subjects. I will give a more detailed description of Cybermentor later. I want to use this post to talk about my reasons for wanting to mentor in general and what my experience has been like with the program Cybermentor specifically. I hope that this might inspire you or help you make a more informed decision if you are considering mentoring with Cybermentor.

Two disclaimers before I start:

What I say will be informed by the very narrow experience I have had these last two years. For example, I only know what it is like to mentor fairly young girls (around 7th grade).

Throughout this post I will refer primarily to the binary gender identities female and male for brevity. I unfortunately could not find information about whether gender diverse persons can participate in the Cybermentor program as a mentor or a mentee. I believe that everyone who fits under the German FLINTA* acronym should be included in initiatives for gender equality that are typically designed for women.

Why I decided to mentor and why specifically girls

I first want to discuss why I wanted to start mentoring in the first place and why I chose a program that is exclusively for female students. For me, the answer to both these questions is the same: I want to do gender equality work for young girls. You have probably heard of the term “leaky pipeline”. This term describes how the percentage of women in science drops at every degree level and career step. I dedicate a portion of my time to lessen this issue for mathematics students at the University of Bonn. But in reality, female mathematics students are already the “survivors”; the problem starts much much earlier. Studies have shown that differences in STEM interest and confidence already differ in primary school. I think that one important reason is the lack of role models.

Role models

For a lot of young girls their father is the one helping with their maths homework, most of their physics teachers are men and whenever they say they like science, some woman will reply how much she hated this and that subject and how bad she was at it. And then to make up for it they get told about Marie Curie as if they could relate to someone with two Nobel prizes that is long dead. Little girls need realistic role models they can look up to and unfortunately those can be hard to come by. Mentoring can fill that role and I think that not having won a Nobel Prize can be a benefit. Seeing “ordinary” people like me be confident and excited about STEM can be more motivating for a lot of young girls.

Focus on the mentee

Another benefit of mentoring is that it provides a space where one can focus entirely on the interests and needs of the mentee. I think this can be a real problem in school, where if you already have lower confidence and interest in STEM, you might ask less questions and get lower grades, producing a feedback loop. In mentoring, there is no or very little comparison with peers and, at least in Cybermentor, there is no final goal to be achieved and no grade to be feared.

Why women(FLINTA*)-only programs are important

You might have apprehensions about a program being exclusively for girls. And if you are not educated on this topic I can understand the confusion. After all, boys like science too and deserve to have people supporting their interests. But where there is a gender-specific problem there needs to be a gender-specific solution. Programs like this one don’t provide an advantage for girls, they aim to correct a tiny sliver of the disadvantages they suffer under patriarchy. (“Suffering under patriarchy” doesn’t mean “suffering under men”. All genders suffer under patriarchy (albeit in different ways and severities) and all genders perpetuate it to a certain degree.) Additionally, a lot of the mentors on the platform would, like me, probably not be participating in a program aimed at all school children. I care mainly about lessening gender-specific issues, not about mentoring in general.

Why I chose Cybermentor

Scientific backing

What immediately sold me on Cybermentor was that it is accompanied by research. The project is led by Prof. Dr. Heidrun Stöger (Chair of Pedagogy at University of Regensburg) and Prof. Dr. Dr. Albert Ziegler (Chair of Educational Psychology and Research on Excellence at the Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nürnberg) and the entire team includes even more experts on pedagogy. They use questionnaires that are filled out before, during and after a year of mentoring by the mentees and control groups to see how the program affects aspects like interest in STEM and career choices. There is already quite a large number of published papers about Cybermentor (see here). They find that the program has a positive impact, e.g. on intention to study a STEM subject. Here are some numbers they provide on their website: Among girls who were interested in participating in Cybermentor but could not due to the limited amount of spots, 44% go on to choose STEM as an area of study and profession. For girls that did get to participate in the project, that number rises to 62%. This gives me confidence that spending that time every week does make an impact on the students.

Safety of mentees

What I really value about the program is that it takes the security of its mentees seriously. This is important to me because, while I know that I am not a dangerous person and neither are most people, I don’t want to encourage young girls to be careless about their safety online. When I signed up for the program, I had to confirm my identity using my ID card. Additionally, the entire platform is designed so that all communication (emails, messages, video calls) is possible via the website. I know that other mentors handle that very differently but it is important to me that I don’t have access to my mentees phone number or any private information. Because, again, while I wouldn’t use it for anything malicious of course, I don’t want to normalize giving out your phone number to strangers online. I think the only thing you get to know a priori about your mentee is her first name and maybe the school she goes to (because there is possible communication with a teacher from her school).

Short description of Cybermentor

Most of what I will be saying in this section is just from the Cybermentor website. So go look there for further information!

As stated already, Cybermentor is an online mentoring program where women with careers or studies in STEM mentor girls from grade 5 to 13. It started in 2005 and is organized by the universities Regensburg and Erlangen-Nürnberg. Participation in English is possible but it seems to me that German is the default option. But that will only mean that you won’t be able to understand some of the content on the website; I don’t think the mentoring itself would be affected much. Every year 800 students get to participate in the program. There are two slightly different models: the regular Cybermentor and Cybermentor Plus. The latter just means that your mentee will also participate in a girls-only STEM club at school. These two aspects don’t interact much besides you being able to contact the teacher to talk about your mentee (such meetings are strongly encouraged by the program but didn’t end up happening for me).
It is recommendable to request a Cybermentor Plus mentee to ensure that all girls participating in these clubs get a mentor. You will be assigned a “regular” mentee if all Plus-mentees have already been assigned.

At the beginning of October, each of the students gets matched to a mentor based on STEM interests and mentoring expectations that are surveyed beforehand. Then two pairs get matched to form what is called a “community”. The platform has a lot of different areas: there is a forum with subforums just for mentors and mentees respectively, a list of interesting STEM events to participate in, a section with how-to videos and project ideas, a platform-internal magazine, and a lot more. Most important are probably the different communication methods: There is an internal e-mail system, a direct messaging chat where you can also create group chats and the platform has a video calling feature. You also have a forum just for your community.

The mentoring year is split into four phases that are each three months long and which you can use to structure your mentoring: STEM daily, STEM active, STEM together and STEM review. In STEM daily you get to know your mentee and possibly your community. You can already work on a small project to get started, ideally one from your daily life. In STEM active you pick an exciting bigger project and spend the months just working on that. Afterwards, you can use the STEM together phase to look beyond your horizon and work with other communities with different STEM interest on a shared project. Lastly, in the STEM review phase you can reflect on your mentoring year and all that you have learned and accomplished. Summer break is during this phase, so you won’t get much done here. The mentoring phases are mostly a suggestion and you should just go with what feels best for your mentee and community. I personally have only stuck to them very loosely.

The program recommends that you keep in regular contact and spend at least 20 minutes a week with your mentee. That contact can look very differently. If your mentee prefers working independently that time might be spread over the course of the whole week answering questions in the chat. For me that time has mostly been spent on one single video call every week. Though, we usually spend way more time than those recommended 20 minutes. In my first year it was about two hours every week. This year it is closer to one hour with small homework assignments between the calls.

When the year ends you can decide together as a community whether you want to keep being a community, a mentoring pair or even a participant in the program at all.

My experience with the program so far

I will make the disclaimer from above again: I have only had one mentee so far and two different communities, so my experience is still pretty narrow. I have seen on the platform forum that the experience can be quite different as the motivation and age of the girls on the platform varies greatly. I also need to say that my mentee has been most amazing: she is responsible, motivated, sociable, a very good logical thinker and has a lot of initiative. So take everything I say with a grain of salt and please don’t be disappointed if your mentoring isn’t what I am presenting to you here.

Starting out

As with everything new, starting out was a little scary. Before signing up, I attended an information video call for potential mentors. They get organized regularly before the registration deadline. That call really helped me get a feel for the program and ultimately made me decide to sign up. When I got the login-in for the website I was nervous. I spent the afternoon watching how-to videos on the platform that explain the mentoring process, tell you about the all the features and give tips on how to make your mentoring go a little smoother. Those videos were very good at making me feel less helpless. I then crafted an email to my mentee, introducing myself and making myself seem as approachable as possible. We exchanged a few emails over the coming weeks and then arranged our first meeting that was just writing back and forth in the chat. Afterwards, we met every week on video call.

I also contacted the other mentor in the community during the first week of being on the platform. We tried out the platform internal video call feature together and exchanged ideas for possible community projects down the line. Additionally, I remember attending a short video call workshop at some point where we got information about the program and tips similar to those in the how-to videos. Afterwards, you got the opportunity to talk to some mentors and mentees which was encouraging. I think they do these types of calls at the beginning of every mentoring phase.

Online Mentoring

Disadvantages

There are a number of reasons to be sceptical about online mentoring: how are you going to get young girls to regularly log into a website and possibly attend weekly video calls? And how are you supposed to foster a connection with your mentee without meeting them in person?

I have found that children can be more responsible than we might give them credit for. I think since most of the activities in their life are mandatory, they apply the same logic to the mentoring meetings. But of course some of the mentees are less responsible and since most people don’t log into the platform more than three times a week, rescheduling can be difficult. In the end, the program is supposed to be fun for the mentees. So if you can ensure that they don’t loose motivation by skipping a week or just doing a side project with the second mentee, I think that is perfectly fine.

I do think it’s harder to develop a connection with your mentee, unfortunately. But just by asking about how their day was and if the weather is equally terrible over there, they happily share and grow more comfortable. In the end, the goal isn’t (and shouldn’t be) to become their best friend; you just need to be someone they can look up to and trust to support their ideas and learning.

It can also be hard to get everyone engaged on a video call. I find myself being very talkative in these calls and thus often take on somewhat of a moderating role. In the projects I have worked on, we usually switch between who of the mentees shares her screen. This is great to get that mentee to do hands-on work but it also means that most of the conversation is between me, her and possibly the other mentor. I think I need to get better at also engaging the second mentee.

Advantages

A big advantage of online mentoring is convenience. Both you and and the mentee can participate from wherever you are. I have done mentoring meetings while visiting my parents and while being on vacation. Since I don’t have an office or anything, I still need to go home for the call but if you do have a private office or work from home, you don’t need to move at all.

Another important advantage is that mentors and mentees can be matched throughout the whole country. Since the project is advertised more in certain states of Germany, and at certain universities and schools, I am sure that the distribution of mentors and mentees in Germany does not match up well. I like that this allows more mentees to benefit from this program.

Project choice

While finding a fitting project can be quite the hard task, Cybermentor helps you out by providing a database of project examples, sorted by phases and STEM subjects. Every participant can upload a project they have done to this database, which is also a great way to motivate your mentee.

I don’t really have an amazing system figured out on finding projects so I will just use this section to describe the projects I have worked on.

My first year

At the start of my first Cybermentor year, I focused on trying to get to know my mentee. I came up with the idea to do some online STEM quizzes together, but finding a good age-appropriate one online was easier said than done. In the end, I chose one that the German education ministry was running at the time but that is already offline again, unfortunately. We just played this on video call for two weeks I think. Afterwards, I asked her what she wanted to do and she said she was interested in learning about a historically influential woman in STEM. Since she liked maths, I picked out short youtube videos on Ada Lovelace, Emmy Noether and Sophie Germain as options (the links in case you are interested: Ada Lovelace, Emmy Noether and Sophie Germain). She picked out Ada Lovelace and we spend a few weeks doing research and creating a poster. We then uploaded it to the database mentioned before.

After finishing this project, we wanted to get to know the other two people in the community and possibly do a project with them. The four of us met on video call and settled on learning to program a game together. I myself used the platform Scratch a lot as a kid, so we ended up going with that option. Scratch is an online programming platform run by MIT and is designed specifically for kids. You can code games and animations pretty easily using a block-based programming language. Afterwards, you can even share your creations on their website and play the games that other people have made. It is really easy to get started with and the mentees got the hang of it fairly quickly. We first worked through some of the tutorials on the website and then got started on programming our own game. It started out as a jump-and-run but quickly developed into a hodgepodge of whatever came to mind.

There are two issues that we ran into: firstly, Scratch is really lightweight and doesn’t provide many fancy features out of the box as a game engine might. So we actually struggled quite a bit with the jump-and-run: we realized slowly that we probably needed hitboxes to make our idea work and then we had to find out how to implement these hitboxes ourselves. Secondly, there isn’t really a good way to work on projects collaboratively. I know there are bigger projects with multiple people working on them on the platform but I have not really found out how they do it. The solution that ended up working for us was to have one mentee working on the project per call. After the call we then publicly uploaded the project to the platform and then used the platforms “remix”-feature to have the other mentee continue working on the project in the next call. Overall, I still think Scratch is one of the best ways to get into coding and I would highly recommend it.

We spend the second and third phase of the mentoring year on this project and with the summer break in the fourth phase we never really got around to doing more video calls due to scheduling conflicts. After the year was up, the other mentor decided not to continue the program due to personal reasons and we lost contact with her mentee, but my mentee and me decided to sign up for the next mentoring round together.

My second year

This time we could skip the introductions and get right into our first project. My mentee said she was interested in learning how to solve a Rubik’s cube and since I had also never learned how to do it, we got right into it by starting with a tutorial. We used the tutorial here and an online simulator here. We took our time with it, trying to memorize the algorithm as we went along, and I think we solved the cube for the first time after three or four weeks. She was really interest in learning why this algorithm worked but after looking into it a bit, I concluded that it was pretty hard to understand. So instead, we tried to figure out ourselves how to display different patterns on the cube. The list of patterns we used is here. Learning the algorithm didn’t require a lot of thinking, so I think this was a great addition. We also tried solving some other cubes like the 2x2, which turned out to be harder than I thought because there are permutations that are not possible as positions of the corners of a 3x3.

Afterwards, the other mentor in the community contacted us and we decided to again try to program a game together. (I think every kid interested in STEM wants to know how to program games.) Because of the issues with Scratch I discussed above, I thought we should try a different platform this time. I did some research and considered Godot, Löve, Unity, Gamemaker and AppInventor. I settled on Gamemaker and AppInventor as the best two options as both allow visual-based coding (similar to that of Scratch) and I thought this would make it easier for my mentee to transition from Scratch. I presented these two options to the girls and they chose Gamemaker. Since it is a full game engine and has a lot different features, getting started was harder than anticipated. We spent months just doing tutorials and then tinkering around with them a little bit afterwards. This also allowed us to transition slowly from the visual code to typical written code.

A lot of our time was just spent searching for that one box you had to tick or why it was doing this weird thing it hadn’t done before or how to do that tiny thing that sounds so easy to do. In Scratch, you could come up with a fun idea and get it into the game in two hours. In contrast to that, our lack of skills and understanding of Gamemaker felt very limiting to our creativity. Collaborating also wasn’t that much easier than in Scratch. I think you could easily have used git but that seemed way to complicated to explain to middle schoolers. So the mentees just ended up sending the files back and forth by email. We have now been trying to code our own platformer but progress has been very slow and we are still sticking very close to the tutorials. Comparing this to our experience with Scratch, I think we should have stuck with Scratch or found a platform that was similarly lightweight. Unless you yourself have experience using Gamemaker and feel confident with it, I don’t think it is recommendable for mentoring projects.

The summer break has started, so we won’t be seeing each other for a while but I do hope to do some more calls to look back on our progress during the year. Especially, since both mentees will not continue Cybermentor as they anticipate more stress in school.

Conclusion

I have had a lot of fun with the program in the last two years. Being responsible for my mentee and our projects has been a welcome challenge that has given me a lot of confidence and seeing my mentee develop her skills fills me with pride. I hope that she will keep the enthusiasm she has displayed during the mentoring. I think it is a privilege to be able to share my interest in maths and computer science and I hope that this can be a way to give back to the community. I also would not be where I am today without all the amazing people, like the teachers of my maths club and the organizers of maths olympiads, who have invested time and effort into growing my skills in and enthusiasm for STEM. I hope that this might inspire you to also share your skills with young people, whether it is through mentoring, helping out at a STEM club or whatever else you can think of.

In October, I will get a new mentee and I am sure my experience will be quite different then. At some point I might report back here on my blog on this topic. Thank you for reading!

(The title image is some free to use stock image because Cybermentor’s images are not free to use.)