Progress Log for Mentoring Programming Education

Programming knowledge has become necessary for people. There are several methods describing how to teach programming but the success of the usage of these methods depends on the students’ preliminary knowledge and the teachers’ attitude. Moreover, the groups are usually not separated by knowledge level or skills and are therefore very heterogeneous. Every student is different and has their own way to learn programming but the key stages and exams are fixed. Our research focuses on monitoring the personal development of programming knowledge in a big group. The main questions are: how can students prepare themselves in an effective way; how can teachers notice problems before the exams; how can the curriculum developer utilize the feedback. We propose a tool named the Progress Log to solve these problems and present the experience we gained by introducing it in a course in which six hundred students take part.