I didn’t plan to spend my weekend herding two middle schoolers through a game jam, but fate had other ideas.
“Just mentor them a bit,” they said. “It’ll be fun!” they said.
I’d been asked, last-minute, to mentor two middle schoolers eighth and ninth graders during a weekend “Build-a-thon.”
I’m a senior Android engineer and occasional game development mentor, so I expected to spend 48 caffeine-fueled hours teaching arrays, tilesets, and maybe some basic game logic. Instead, I found myself mediating creative explosions, emotional whiplash, and a tug-of-war between two brilliant but combustible imaginations.
Their project, which they proudly titled Eco-nomy, was a digital board game about saving or exploiting the planet. One team played as Forest, planting trees and cleaning pollution. The other, Industry, mined resources and built factories. It was conceptually sharp an eco-capitalism duel. But the execution? Chaotic.
The Hackathon Meltdown
It started with pure energy whiteboard sketches, quick Godot prototypes, laughter, and instant noodle wrappers multiplying like power-ups. Then, as the caffeine wore off and the logic grew tangled, the temperature in the room rose.
They fought about everything. One wanted to build a full-blown card system, complete with randomized draws, resource costs, and special abilities. The other just wanted a simple drag-and-drop mechanic place tiles, take turns, keep it fast and visual.
I tried to intervene like an engineer. I pointed at the backlog we’d written in Notion and said, “Let’s stick to the MVP.” That only made it worse. They accused each other of “ruining the vision.”
By the second meltdown, I was googling phrases like how to mentor teenagers without losing your sanity. That’s when I stumbled back on a book I’d read years ago but never really applied outside of family life: Ross W. Greene’s The Explosive Child.
It’s a parenting book. But in that chaotic moment, it felt like a software manual for emotional systems under load.
“Kids Do Well If They Can”
Greene’s first and most famous principle is deceptively simple: Kids do well if they can.
He argues that kids aren’t difficult because they want to be they’re difficult because they’re missing the skills to handle frustration, flexibility, or problem-solving in that moment.
That line reframed everything. My mentees weren’t being defiant they were overwhelmed. The scope was huge, the time was short, and their emotional bandwidth was thinner than their FPS counter.
Once I looked through that lens, their arguments stopped feeling like personal resistance and started looking like lagging skills. They weren’t refusing to collaborate they just hadn’t learned how to regulate disagreement yet.
So instead of enforcing rules (“We’re sticking to this plan!”), I took a breath and tried empathy first. “Looks like both of you have strong ideas for the economy system,” I said. “What’s making it tricky to agree right now?”
That single question changed the tone. They went from attacking each other to explaining themselves to me. One admitted, “I just don’t want my team to be boring.” The other confessed, “I’m scared we won’t finish if we keep adding stuff.”
Beneath the shouting, there were valid emotions creativity and fear wrestling for control.
Regulate Before Reasoning
Greene emphasizes that logic is useless when someone’s brain is in fight-or-flight mode. You can’t reason with a mind on fire.
I learned this the hard way.
At one point, one student was supposed to design the board tiles forests, factories, rivers while his teammate handled the game logic. But after nearly an hour, his screen was still blank except for a single half-drawn tree. His partner exploded: “We’re never going to finish at this pace!”
The air thickened. The designer froze, eyes fixed on his tablet, shoulders tight. My instinct was to jump straight into “fix mode”: Let’s review your workflow, optimize your sprite pipeline, speed this up. But the tension in the room told me logic would bounce off a wall of stress.
So I changed tactics. “Let’s take a break,” I said. “Grab water. Stretch.” I turned the conversation away from the task asked about their favorite games instead. Ten minutes later, laughter returned. When we sat back down, the artist quietly opened his canvas and started sketching again. By the next hour, the board had color and personality.
That was regulate before reasoning in action. I learned that when creativity jams, pressure only tightens the knot. Sometimes the fastest way forward is stepping away not to escape the work, but to reset the brain behind it.
Lagging Skills, Not Bad Behavior
Greene’s framework treats challenging moments as unsolved problems, not acts of rebellion.
Midway through the hackathon, I noticed a pattern. Whenever we hit a design disagreement, one student would quietly drift away from the project watching YouTube or sneaking in a few minutes of Minecraft. Meanwhile, his teammate would start panicking about the deadline, muttering, “He’s not even working anymore!”
Initially, I saw it as procrastination. But when I thought in terms of lagging skills, I recognized something else: they didn’t know how to handle scope stress. They weren’t lazy they lacked the executive function to break big problems into smaller ones.
So I shifted my mentorship from “enforcer” to “coach.” I sat down and said, “Let’s split this into milestones. You finish the resource system while your teammate designs the board grid. Once both work, we merge.”
Suddenly, momentum returned. They felt capable again because the task had been right-sized to their skill level.
It reminded me of something Greene wrote: “Challenging behavior occurs when the demands being placed on a child exceed the child’s capacity to respond adaptively.” Substitute developer for child, and you’ve got a perfect postmortem for half of all failed sprints.
Collaborative Problem Solving (Plan B)
Greene describes three “plans” adults can use when conflict arises:
- Plan A: Impose your will.
- Plan B: Solve collaboratively.
- Plan C: Drop the issue temporarily.
As a senior engineer, I realized I defaulted to Plan A far too often “We’ll do it this way because it’s the most efficient.” But hackathons (and children) don’t thrive on efficiency; they thrive on ownership.
So I tried Plan B.
During a heated debate over whether trees should generate gold or points, I resisted the urge to “decide as the adult.” Instead, I asked, “What would make it fair for both?”
They thought. One suggested that trees generate gold, but only if forests stay healthy. The other proposed that pollution lowers the forest’s gold yield. Within minutes, they had invented an elegant feedback loop a mechanic I would have over-engineered into oblivion.
Collaborative problem solving didn’t just fix the argument; it unlocked innovation.
The Turnaround
By the final day, the chaos had finally found a shape. The game didn’t look great the art was clunky, the colors uneven, and the tiles didn’t quite align but it worked. Players could drag and drop tiles across the board, trying to form patterns that, when connected, triggered special abilities: a forest alignment would sap production points from Team Industry, while a chain of factories could choke the planet faster.
It wasn’t elegant, but it was alive. The students, once at odds, were now playtesting side by side, laughing as they discovered unintended combos and quick-fixing bugs together.
They even began resolving disagreements without me. “Let’s just test both versions,” one said. “We’ll keep whichever feels fairer.”
They submitted Eco-nomy minutes before the deadline. The judges smiled politely at the art but loved the idea a tiny eco-strategy born from two competing visions that somehow fused into one. It’s here if you want to see it:
👉https://devpost.com/software/eco-nomy-xz09w8
For me, the real victory wasn’t on the screen. It was in seeing those two explosive minds finally synchronize not because I took control, but because I learned to let go just enough for collaboration to happen.
The Reflection
In software teams, we often focus on technical mentorship: code reviews, architecture decisions, performance tuning. But mentoring those two kids reminded me that leadership whether with junior developers or middle schoolers is fundamentally about emotional scaffolding.
Greene’s principles translate almost perfectly into the engineering world:
- “Kids do well if they can” becomes “Developers do well if the system allows.” Struggles aren’t signs of incompetence; they’re signs of unmet skill development or unclear expectations.
- “Regulate before reasoning” becomes “Don’t debug while you’re burning out.” Step away before you escalate.
- “Collaborative problem solving” becomes “Pair-program your way out of conflict.” Shared ownership outperforms imposed hierarchy.
Mentorship, like parenting, isn’t about control it’s about creating the conditions for competence.
When I think back to those two students their laughter, their messiness, their boundless conviction I realize The Explosive Child isn’t just a parenting guide. It’s a philosophy of human development: that people grow best when they feel understood first, instructed second.
And maybe that’s the secret to mentoring, managing, or even living well with others in high-pressure, creative work:
People do well if they can. And if they can’t yet, our job isn’t to punish it’s to teach.
References
The Explosive Child by Dr. Ross Greene
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