App Development Mentor (Summer 2025)

App Development Mentor (remote, part-time, & $35-40/hr based on experience)
This is a part-time remote position (12-15 hours/week) from July 1 to Aug 8, 2025

Do you remember that person who made you realize your true potential?

The one who championed you while you traversed the path towards academic or professional success.

Your mentor. Maybe you had one, or even several, if you were very lucky!

Do you want to be that mentor to younger students? Do you have mobile app development, front-end design, UI/UX experience and expertise? Are you interested in learning more about Machine Learning without having to do backend Python programming?

Yes, yes and yes? Great! We have an amazing opportunity for you!

This summer we are working with the MIT RAISE Initiative once again to host a very exciting 6-week AI program called the MIT FutureMakers Create-a-thon! This program runs from July 1st through August 8th, 2025 and will bring together students from across the US to help them develop skills related to AI, applied machine learning, app development and entrepreneurship through a virtual program led by mentors.

We would love to have YOU as a mentor to help high-school or early college students learn app development skills while you also get the chance to be trained in MIT's AppInventor platform --- all while getting paid for your efforts!

Your responsibilities will be to:

• As part of a two-mentor team, you will train, support and encourage a small group of ten to twelve students as they develop App development skills and AI intuitions using the provided AppInventor curriculum.
• Day-to-day, interact with your group of trainees through daily meetings.
• Help them use those skills to build a larger project to complete the program.
• Keep your group accountable for finishing their prior day's tasks.
• Help unblock them when they are stuck by pointing them to resources, showing them how to debug code and/or giving them helpful hints to discover the answer on their own.

The curricula for the program will be provided and you will be trained in the AppInventor curriculum and in being an effective mentor.

Requirements for applicants

• Currently enrolled or recent graduates from Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or related fields;
• Passionate about teaching and mentoring younger students; especially invested in mentoring students from underserved backgrounds in science and technology;
• Or have current/recent experience with middle or high-school school STEM teaching;
• Excellent communication, time-management and teamwork skills.
• Able to commit to 12-15 hours per week from July 1st through August 8, 2025
  • You must be available to lead live sessions during the window of 12pm - 4pm ET Mon-Fri.
• Able to commit to
  • AppInventor Training from 12:30-5:30PM ET from June 18-30th,
  • Mentoring Across Differences training from 5:00-6:30PM on June 9-11th. Please note all training hours will be compensated.

Preferred but not required

• Experience with front-end design, app design, and/or UI/UX development;
• Experience with AppInventor, Scratch or other block-based programming

Benefits

• You will deepen your technical skills (look up 'protege effect')
• Work on exciting, challenging and incredibly rewarding work critical to the future of ethical AI 
• Build up your CV with fantastic leadership and team management experience
• Get trained in mentorship and professional skills, including communication, self-branding, entrepreneurship, equitable leadership, and more
• Attend technical skills talks by industry professionals
• Be an integral part of an impactful movement towards opportunity equity in tech and AI
• Valuable networking opportunities with industry leaders within enterprise, tech and academia

It is a win-win for you and your trainees. Apply today!

If you're excited about being a mentor but are hesitating about the requirements, go ahead and apply anyway - we'd love to hear from you!

Diverse minds building diverse technology is SureStart's mission. We would love to see a wide variety of candidates presenting their unique perspectives, experiences, and skills. We are an equal opportunity employer and highly value diversity. SureStart does not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.

Keywords for this job: app development, mobile app development, frontend design, HCI, human computer interaction, UI design, UX design, training, mentorship, MOOC, online training, data science jobs, machine learning jobs, machine vision, affective computing, emotion AI, Natural Language Processing, NLP, internships, interns, co-ops, speech recognition, tts, speech synthesis, image processing, HCI, human computer interaction, Python, Tensorflow, Keras, PyTorch, data scientist.