🧑🏫 Mentor Playbook
Thank you for volunteering. You're the reason this event works.
🎯 Your Role
You're a guide on the side, not a hands-on builder. Unblock teams, coach their prompts, manage their energy, and watch the clock so they don't burn 35 minutes building and 5 minutes panicking about the pitch.
The students drive. You steer.
✅ Do / ❌ Don't
| ✅ Do | ❌ Don't |
|---|---|
| Ask open questions: "What are you trying to do?" | Take the keyboard, even when it's faster |
| Sit next to the team, not at their laptop | Solve the problem for them |
| Read errors and prompts out loud with them | Add scope — "why don't you also add…" |
| Celebrate small wins (first feature on screen) | Push your own opinion on which problem to pick |
| Give teams a heads-up when time's tight | Spend >5 minutes on one team unless it's serious |
"What did Kiro say when you tried that?" beats "You need to add a button here." Keeps them learning.
🗓️ The Day at a Glance
The full day runsheet is on the Hackathon Day Guide. Your job at each stage in one line:
| Stage | What you're doing |
|---|---|
| 🏫 School registration (9:00) | Greet your teams as they arrive — reduce day-one nerves |
| 🌅 Welcome & introduction (9:30) | Sit with your team; back up the facilitator's framing |
| 🎯 Icebreaker & problem exploration (9:40) | Run the Icebreaker with energy; help teams explore the problem list and land on one they care about. Push personas toward specifics |
| 💡 Ideation (10:25) | Quick, kind feedback on top ideas — push teams to shrink scope |
| ☕ Short break (11:00) | Grab water, reset yourself; check no team is stuck on a blocker |
| 🛠️ Design & prototyping with Kiro (11:10) | Triage, prompt-coach, reinforce Trustworthy AI, scope-manage, push for 2 self-ideated features — see below. Help teams get Kiro signed in if needed (personal @gmail.com, not school) |
| 🍕 Lunch (12:10) | Eat — but keep an eye out for a team drifting |
| 🧪 Final testing & refine pitch (12:35) | 1 thing working / 1 thing confusing / 1 small fix. Then make them stop coding and coach the story. One out-loud rehearsal |
| 🎤 Pitch presentations & judges feedback (1:00) | Sit with your team, cheer hard, take notes on wins so you can debrief after |
| ⚡ Judges deliberation & student energizer (1:50) | Help run the energizer — keep the room up |
| 🏆 Winners announced & prizes (2:05) | Cheer everyone, not just the winners |
| 🪞 Session reflection & wrap up (2:15) | Encourage students to share — their voice improves next year |
| 👋 Schools depart (2:30) | Farewell teams; grab a quick debrief with the organisers |
💬 Prompt Coaching
Vague prompts are the #1 reason students get bad results from Kiro. Help them be specific by asking three questions:
- What are you building? (form, list, map, chart?)
- What data does it need? (which fields?)
- Where does it go? (new page, below header, sidebar?)
| ❌ Vague | ✅ Specific |
|---|---|
| "Make a page about pollution" | "Add a page that lists 5 Auckland beaches, each showing its name and a 'Safe to swim?' status" |
| "Add a map" | "Add a map showing a pin for each beach using its latitude and longitude" |
| "Fix the form" | "The date field doesn't save when I submit — fix the date picker" |
| "Make it look better" | "Use ocean blue as the background, white for headers, larger beach names" |
If Kiro hasn't fixed something after 2 attempts, pause and rethink the prompt — don't burn 15 minutes wrestling.
🏆 What Judges Look For
Judges have their own guide — the Judging Guide covers the six assessment criteria, how to give positive and constructive feedback, and how to support student confidence. Point your teams at the criteria list so they know what to aim for:
- Problem and Impact — who's affected, why it matters
- Solution — clear, logical, relevant
- Use of Kiro — how and why they used it
- Feasibility — realistic for a prototype, with honest next steps
- Creativity and Innovation — thoughtful, human-centred
- Communication — clear, structured, confident, teamwork visible
A simple winning pitch shape teams can steal:
"We built [app] because [problem affecting persona]. It works by [how]. Here's what it looks like — [demo]. If we had more time, we'd add [next]."
For the full judging playbook (including feedback language and body cues), send students and mentors to the Judging Guide.
🧭 Reinforcing Trustworthy AI
Students have a Trustworthy AI section in their guide covering four things: being honest about AI use, verifying what Kiro produces, keeping personal info out of prompts, and speaking up if something feels wrong.
Your job during Design & prototyping is to reinforce all four without being heavy about it:
- If a team quotes a "fact" from Kiro, ask "where did that come from — did you check it?"
- If they're typing real names or personal details into a prompt, redirect to the persona.
- If anything Kiro produces feels off, tell them to stop and name it — that's a moment worth slowing down for.
- Nudge teams to plan one sentence in their pitch about how they used Kiro — it's an easy judges win.
See the full student-facing guidance in the Trustworthy AI section.
🆘 When to Escalate
- Tech issue you can't fix in 5 minutes → flag the event organiser or AWS technical mentor.
- Pastoral issue (student upset, conflict, anything off) → flag the event organiser immediately. Don't handle it solo.
- Kiro acting up across multiple teams → flag the AWS mentor — could be an outage.
See Troubleshooting for common technical fixes.
The students will remember this day for years. A big part of that is you. Thanks for being here.