Change of Students´ Motivation in an Introductory Programming Course for Non-computing Majors

In this research, the motivational aspects of the students while learning introductory programming was monitored and analyzed. The students were in the social welfare department, and the programming language used was Java and Processing. Monitoring students´ motivation throughout the course was found to be important because, by doing so, the weak points in the syllabus could be found and modified. It was also found to be important to devise topics relevant to the students, and to adjust the level of difficulty of the assignments so that the students can feel confident studying.