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.