Mind Bubble is off to a rousing start for the 2017 school year! Tutoring is a wonderful experience for both the middle schoolers who get to complete their homework and the tutors who get the chance to hang out with such a great bunch of kids. Playing games after homework brings a lot of fun to the tutorial sessions while students continue practicing their critical thinking skills!

Our workshop this month was on the art of debate and all of the kids who participated devised strong arguments and got to practice their public speaking skills. Whether you’re a chess expert or have never played before in your life, our workshop this month is for you! “Checkmate,” a chess workshop for all skill levels, is on Saturday, 10/14, from 4:30-6:30 PM. The workshop is intended for middle school students, so registration preference will be given to students in grades 6 through 8. Register on the workshops page of our website and we hope to see you there!

Follow us on Twitter: @MindBubbleAtl, Instagram: @mindbubbleatl, and Facebook: Mind Bubble. Tune in every week to see a tutor and student who are featured.

With all the great things happening at Mind Bubble this fall, now is the time to register for our tutoring and workshops and make this school year the best yet!

A lot has happened in the world of Mind Bubble since our last update. The most exciting news, of course, is that we’ve just wrapped up our second weekly tutoring session! There were several things we thought would be true before our first tutoring session – we thought our tutors would be brilliant, engaging, and friendly. We thought our students would be passionate, energetic, and caring. And we thought that pairing each student with one of our tutors would result in magic. Two weeks in, we’re happy to report that we now know all of these things to be true. Tutors and students have been hard at work successfully tackling difficult topics like math, earth science, and language arts. We’ve also had the chance to play a few board and card games after tutoring (Both Apples to Apples and Set appear to be favorites among our students).

As word about Mind Bubble has spread, our numbers have grown since our first tutoring session, which was attended by two dedicated students. We now have so many students indicating interest weekly that we’ve had to implement an advance registration system so that we can be sure that we have enough tutors to accommodate all of our students. We’d like to one day be able to help all students who drop by, but, at the moment, the number of available tutors and the tutoring space we have at Challenges Games and Comics limit the number of students we can see every week. If you are interested in registering your student, please sign up for our email list, and you’ll be sent a weekly registration link that will allow you to sign your student up for tutoring that week. Our tutoring slots are first come, first served, but we do give preference to returners and families who have been on the waitlist for several weeks.

We’d just like to end by thanking all of those who have made these first two weeks of tutoring so successful: the fantastic, generous tutors who donate their time to help our students; Challenges, which provides a welcoming environment for our tutoring sessions; our delightful students, who show up ready to work hard; and the dedicated parents who do so much for their children. Thank you all for all that you do, and we look forward to making the Mind Bubble experience even better for all involved in the weeks and months to come!

Summer has fully taken hold! The days are hot, waves are crashing at the beach, and it’s a great time for family board games! I’ve gotten my family hooked on a deduction-based party game called Spyfall – I heartily recommend it to anyone looking to fill the long summer days with a family-friendly activity!

In addition to some great summer beach-going and gaming, Mind Bubble has also been busy creating social media sites in preparation for our launch this fall. Please feel free to take a gander at our profiles on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn! We’ll start posting to these accounts as we get closer to our first session in September.

Finally, importantly, are you interested in signing your student up for Mind Bubble tutoring this fall? Head on over to our sign up page and complete our interest survey! We’ll keep you in the loop and send you the link to our first-ever registration event in September!

Here at Mind Bubble, we’ve been working hard over the past year to bring our tutoring program to life. There have been many obstacles, but those obstacles have only served to make our successes more thrilling.

I’m very pleased to announce that, as of today, Mind Bubble has incorporated as an officially sanctioned nonprofit corporation in the state of Georgia!

We already have the logistics in place to initiate our program with a smooth start in the fall. As we move through the summer, we’ll be preparing to hit the ground running with a great group of tutors and students next September! Excitement is in the air!

Here at Mind Bubble we’ve been hard at work over the last year putting together the foundation for a tutoring program that will make a real impact on Atlanta youth. We’ve had to overcome challenges in finding a good partner space to host the program, navigating the incorporation process, and planning for the details that will make or break the success of the program.

Despite the obstacles and the unexpected twists and turns we’ve encountered over the past year, we’re very excited about our new partnerships with Challenges Games and Comics in the North Dekalb Mall in Decatur, GA, and with Volunteer Emory at Emory University.

Right now, we have all the pieces in place to get our tutoring program off the ground in Fall semester 2016! Our first day of tutoring is tentatively scheduled to take place at Challenges Games and Comics on Sunday, September 18th, 2016. We plan to run weekly tutoring sessions there on Sundays from 2 PM – 4 PM.

Students will need to preregister for tutorials, as we will be starting with just enough capacity to serve about 12 students per week. Registrations will open in September in advance of our first tutoring session. Stay tuned for more updates!

We just finished creating the Mind Bubble website!

There’s still a lot of work to be done, so if you’re reading this, expect lots of updates in the coming weeks. Still, we think this is a pretty good platform to begin our adventure working with young people in the great city of Atlanta!

Next big step: find a space where we can actually hold our tutoring program. Right now we’re looking into a couple promising spaces around Little 5 Points and the Old Fourth Ward!

We’ll keep you in the loop!