For the second year, Jared Hopland is volunteering as a mentor with our Dealey Coding Club. A Senior Consultant at Valent Partners, Jared brings his years of engineering experience to support 3rd to 8th grade students learning computer science. We’re lucky to have him on the Bold Idea team!

What have you learned or gained from being a Bold Idea mentor? Allowing kids to be creative with their projects is important to making sure they stay excited about the courses they're doing. If a kid is getting sidetracked, just pointing them back to the course and trying to go step-by-step has rarely worked, but trying to come up with interesting things they can do during the creative project with the skills they're learning now can help them get more motivated.

What is your most memorable mentoring moment? During the demo day, some of the kids would be trying to make updates to their code during their demo because their classmates would throw out suggestions. It shows that they could understand their own program enough to make changes on the spot and they were excited to have their classmates involved in the process.

How did you originally become interested in technology and programming? I did a mechanical engineering co-op where I happened to sit near someone who coded programs tracking production progress. He gave me some tutorials to work through to show I could learn coding, and then started to give me some projects that he hadn't had the time to get to.

What did you study in college? Mechanical Engineering

Is there anything you wish you could tell your younger self about coding? It's not as daunting as it seems!

What is it about Bold Idea's mission that really connects with you? I think being introduced to coding at a young age can make it feel more attainable as a career option. It also helps kids learn to break down complex things into smaller, more understandable chunks so they can plan better if they're starting a new project or understand where root problems are coming from if they're working on something existing. That skill can be used for a lot of things outside of coding too