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Transforming learning of programming: a mentoring project
D'Souza, D., Hamilton, M., Harland, J., Muir, P., Thevathayan, C. and Walker, C.
Programming is central to Computer Science and cognate
disciplines, and poses early-learning challenges in
problem-solving and coding. Since the recent past the
School of Computer Science and Information Technology
(RMIT University) has provided a student mentoring
service to assist novice student programmers
with their programming, indeed, to build up their
confidence in programming. The service has received
favourable feedback from students and, as an interesting
aside, has had the added benefit of increasing
mentors' confidence and improving mentors' communication
skills. Mentors volunteer their services under
a University leadership initiative, and are not paid
to assist students. In light of such success, we secured
a University action-research teaching and learning
grant, to investigate aspects of the service delivered
to date. While mentoring has been shown to be
helpful for novice student programmers to learn and
improve their programming, less recognised, but of
equal importance, is the value to mentors through the
skills and experience they gain. This paper reports
early findings of a dual-purpose research investigation
into the mentoring service. The research project seeks
to discover ways to improve the mentoring service for
novice student programmers, as well as to enhance a
range of qualities in mentors. |
Cite as: D'Souza, D., Hamilton, M., Harland, J., Muir, P., Thevathayan, C. and Walker, C. (2008). Transforming learning of programming: a mentoring project. In Proc. Tenth Australasian Computing Education Conference (ACE 2008), Wollongong, NSW, Australia. CRPIT, 78. Simon and Hamilton, M., Eds. ACS. 75-84. |
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