| Hi, Firstly, cheers and congrats, it sounds like you are already doing good work. My 2 cents: Hold off just a second before finding an ongoing mentor. By 5th grade students can start to get a feel (might be this year or maybe next year) if they like computers or engineering or space exploration or biology or fast cars or another field/type of science work etc... Finding a mentor in area of science that a student loves, after sampling different areas of science can make a huge difference in terms of sticking power. And it minimizes the potential issue of too many mentors coming in and out of their lives as you find nice scientists who want to help but they don't click with the students. It sounds like you are already able to teach science and programming and introduce the students to various scientists and companies and labs. I would continue doing this, as sort of a "middle man and a teacher" until an area of science or type of scientific work grabs the student's attention and he/she connects with it and thirsts to learn more about that thing (for me it was astronomy). Then work on finding a mentor in that area of science. If you haven't heard it, Malcolm Gladwell's interviewed Eric Eisner (who started YES Scholars in LA and deal with similar issues regularly) recently and it might of interest: http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/04-carlos-doesnt-reme... I am in LA and have been a volunteer math tutor for over a decade. Happy to help in other ways if I can. |