Mining compilation data to better prepare and assign K-12 coding mentors

Our university outreach program has introduced over 30,000 Grade 4 to 8 students to functional programming in Elm over the last decade. Pre-pandemic, mentors would visit students in-person classrooms to conduct workshops aligned with their curriculum. With the advent of the pandemic, this switched to virtual visits, which allowed us to teach children in remote regions and other countries, greatly increasing our reach. Further increasing our reach will require smarter use of most important resource: coding mentors. In this retrospective study, we looked at statistics for compilations on our web-based integrated development environment in order to identify patterns that could immediately inform mentor training programs, and in the medium term be used to optimize resources by directing mentors to the students most in need of help, even when they have not explicitly requested help via the built-in mentor chat.