Mentorship & Checkin Sessions
Throughout your event, participants will benefit from close monitoring and mentorship. This aids accountability for participants, and gives you accurate insight into how teams are progressing in their formation and project design, development, and acceleration lifecycles. Mentors can provide guidance and support to hackathon participants, with the goal of helping them to overcome challenges, learn new skills, and ultimately achieve success in the hackathon.
There are several ways you can run mentorship sessions within your virtual hackathon:
1-to-1 Mentorship #
Assign a hacking mentor for each team. The hacking mentor can be on hand to answer any event or product related questions. We recommend finding a suitable mentor that has relevant industry or product experience.
Expert Mentorship #
Another approach is to have mentors who are experts in a particular area or field, available for Q+A from any team or participant. This could either be at a set time of day, or asynchronously via online chat applications or discussion forums.
Group Mentorship #
Group mentorship reduced the amount of contact hours mentors are required to have. This approach is especially useful when mentors have other commitments and/or aren’t being compensated for their time. Mentors can be available for large group calls for 1 or 2 hours once per week. Hackathon participants can join a group call and form breakout rooms around certain topics or blockers that mentors can help with.