Starter Notes on CS Peer Mentoring (2024/25)

The Student Guide or CS Peer Mentoring scheme is a student-led initiative to provide support for students in early years, with a focus on Year 2. More senior students, mainly from Year 4, should act as guides or mentors to junior students, sharing their knowledge and experience in informal sessions that are started in Week 1/2 of Semester 1.

Basics about the set-up:

• In CS this is an opt-in scheme, i.e. it is voluntary for Year 2 students
• You can sign-up to the scheme in the group formation session right after the kick-off session
• It should be student-led. From ca Week 2 onwards, students and mentors should arrange their own events based on interest and feedback from students
• We recommend to identify a regular meeting date: we have booked GRID Collaborate 2 for Wed 1:00-2:00 as venue
• CS academics will continue to act as contact points to support activities:
  • Hans-Wolfgang Loidl <H.W.Loidl@hw.ac.uk>
  • Tessa Berg <T.Berg@hw.ac.uk>
• MACS Student Advisors (first contact point for students):
  • Nicola Forrest <n.forrest@hw.ac.uk>
  • Frances Rowbottom <f.rowbottom@hw.ac.uk>
• Contact in Wellbeing, as Student Success Advisor: "David Little" <David.C.Little@hw.ac.uk>

• Ameen Miah <am2102@hw.ac.uk>
• Eliyas Bojal <esb2000@hw.ac.uk>
• Sebastian Fjell <sf2010@hw.ac.uk>
• Sibila Shihab <ss2190@hw.ac.uk>
• Sweta Acharya <sa2065@hw.ac.uk>
• Ivan Gaponenko <ig2014@hw.ac.uk>

We plan to cap the group sizes at ca 12 students, to enable meaningful interactions. This means we won't be able to cater for all students in the cohort, but for those interested we will try to find a place. We will try to recruit more mentors as we go along.

In the group formation phase, just take on as many students as are interested. We will implement the cap after this point, probably from Week 2 onwards. We want to give all students who are interested an opportunity to engage in the first week.

The initial meeting and group allocation should happen in Week 1, during the F28ED slot: Wed 11.9. 12:00 in LT1. As this is an opt-in activity we won't pre-allocate students and just ask them to sign up online, using a QR code, and to form a group with one of the Peer Mentors.

The schedule on Wed 11.9. is to:

• 12:00: Start of Welcome Back session for Year 2 students
• 12:20 (approx): Introduction to CS Peer Mentoring; we will use the 10 minutes for slides and an introduction of peer mentors
• 13:00: Group formation: After the session students should meet up with mentors for group formation just outside LT1. I suggest you bring your group over to GRID Collaborate 2 (GRGIC2) and use this space for meetings later on.

During group formation start a discussion. Here some general tips:

• Introduce yourself and say in your own words why you would have found such a session useful in Year 2
• Re-inforce the message of a student-led scheme: you (the students) will decide how to spend the time once signed up
• IMPORTANT: Invite students to sign-up for a weekly meeting slot, and get their names and email addresses
• IMPORTANT: Fix a weekly slot that works with everyone interested to meet up (eg. in GRID Collaborate 2)
• Aim to come up with suggestions for activites, based on the discussion below.
• Ask students if they are involved in student societies, and if a society panel member is in the room to get in touch
• If you want to continue discussion with the group on the same day, you may want to walk over to the GRID for brainstorming on activities

Topics that could be covered in the general discussion:

• Ask students about difficulties of remote / hybrid mode of learning
• Ask students about Experiences from Year 1
• Ask students about Expectations on Year 2
• Share own experience in this phase of the studies
• Ask for individual comments and feedback
• Discuss communication channels you can use in the group (Slack, Discord, or other)
• Share contact details for direct communication and suggestions
• Ask for suggestions on activities that would be useful (see below)
• Fix a next/regular meeting date to make sure meetings will continue (on a voluntary basis)

Tips:

• Keep your own intro and statement short and let students do the talking; just get them started with the points above
• If some are hesitant to speak, pass around post-it notes and ask them to write down e.g. experiences/expectations
• Encourage them to sign up at least for the next week, without being to pushy

In order to start activities we could run the events below; get an impression how much interest there is and collect suggestions for further events in this time period.

• Week 1: Kick-off meeting
• Week 2: Try-out-kit session: we can provide robots, oculus rift and other kit (available on loan) and the students can try it out
• Week 3: (Board-) gaming session we plan to bring some simple board games, let student groups play through a game and reflect on how to turn it into a digital game (or other discussion)
• Week 4: Unity tutorial session for those interested in developing games, pick one of the many Unity tutorials and work through them together

Other potential topics for further weeks suggested so far:

• advice from Career Services on a range of issues (we plan to run a seminar specifically on interviews)
• meet-up with some of the student success advisors
• invited talks from HWU alumni
• a Unity intro session for games programming