Supporting E-Mentoring for Programming Labs in Engineering Education

Abstract

Mentoring by teachers, lab instructors or peers during programming labs of engineering students, proves highly beneficial in acquiring the required programming competencies. Electronic mentoring (e-mentoring) uses computer-mediated communication in order to facilitate the mentoring process between the mentor and the mentee. Practicing e-mentoring to facilitate the mentoring process can benefit the students, since it is not bound by temporal or geographical differences. Emails, discussion forums, interactive virtual environments, blogs, wikis, etc., are the most common electronic media that have been used for e-mentoring. In this paper, we present a novel framework and design of a tool to support e-mentoring during programming laboratories. Students can share their codes and errors with the mentors, in real-time, and receive corrections/suggestions for the same. The framework also supports an asynchronous mode, which facilitates e-mentoring by alumni and industry experts. The tool interfaces with the Eclipse IDE of individual student and creates a virtual mentoring environment for facilitating e-mentoring of programming assignments.