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+1 650-669-8789
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Serving Berkeley and surrounding area
Telegraph Ave
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2.1 miEmeryville
2.3 miCalifornia
2.3 mi4th & H Ave
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Specialties
One-on-one code mentoring for kids! Breakout Mentors works with students who are excited about learning to program and want to take it further. We pair each student with one of our passionate UC Berkeley Computer Science mentors for weekly hour and a half sessions. It is fun, creative, builds a long-term interest, and there is no limit to how far your student can go!
History
Established in 2011.
Breakout Mentors started with simple beginnings — there wasn’t a vision to build a business around providing 1-on-1 kids programming mentoring. Rather, it started by observing what support kids and their parents need when learning to code.
In early 2011 the founder Brian Skinner learned about Scratch and other exciting developments that make programming more accessible for kids. Suddenly anyone could get started, including kids as young as 8 years old. No longer are the requirements excellent typing skills and top-notch resilience. Kids all over the world were starting to learn to code and thoroughly enjoying it.
As we learned more, we realized other programming instruction for kids had it wrong! Everyone is trying to inspire more kids to be interested in learning to code. But no one was effectively taking those kids that are interested, and giving them the support necessary to keep advancing. So we set out to solve this problem and offer the best way for kids to learn to code!
Meet the Business Owner
Brian S.
Business Owner
My first experience programming was with a little on-screen robot named Karel during my freshman year at Stanford. It was truly eye-opening how much can be accomplished with very few lines of code. I was instantly hooked and went on to graduate with a degree in mechanical engineering and a minor in computer science.
During college I spent the majority of my time split between the varsity men’s volleyball team and my coursework. After graduating I worked for three and a half years at a small software company as a technical product manager, before leaving to found Breakout Mentors.
