Establishing structured support for programming students

This paper describes the structure, implementation, and impact evaluation of a programming support centre for engineering and computing students. The main focus of this centre is to provide a positive, supportive atmosphere where students can voluntarily seek one-to-one assistance with programming difficulties. The support offered is specifically structured to nurture and leverage each student´s motivation for taking a programming course whilst providing them with individually tailored advice and practical help. A qualitative and quantitative evaluation of the centre´s operation is presented, together with analysis of statistics on student motivation. The results of this research suggest that the newly developed programming support centre has had a positive impact on student learning.