Pre-planning
Jenny Baker: "I've managed to keep in touch with students informally in the past. They enjoy coming back if invited and it's something which gives everyone benefit from both directions. I decided to try to build on this informal contact to create a scheme where these students could be actually helping the present generation of students."
Jenny has always endeavoured to keep in contact with her students after they leave school - particularly those moving on to degree courses at the University of Waikato. Email contacts proved to be a good way for successive classes of students to remain in contact.
Formal planning for the mentoring scheme started when Jenny approached the 15 Year 13 programming students leaving her 2005 class. All were keen to participate. Early in 2006 she sent out a general email to all of the students asking about what they were doing, the courses they had chosen and how they were finding things.
As Jenny says, "It all just started growing naturally from there."
