By mid-course, your Dev Journal stops being only a diary and becomes something rarer: evidence. The person who wrote your your earliest entries no longer quite exists — and because that person wrote honestly, you can prove it. Showing growth means putting your starting self and your now-self side by side and letting the difference speak.
Growth is a claim plus evidence — like a bug report
“I got better at programming” is a claim, worth what any claim is worth: nothing yet. A good bug report never says “it’s broken somehow” — it says exactly what happened, where, and how to reproduce it. Growth writing meets the same standard: every claim reproduced by two dated entries from your own record.
At the start of the course I wrote: “The computer doesn’t guess. Kind of unsettling.” Last week a
TypeErrortold me which line and which two types disagreed, and I had it fixed in two minutes without asking anyone. The strictness that unsettled me is now the thing I count on.
The claim is error messages have switched sides. The evidence is two moments, months apart, both on the record — and nobody can argue with that, including the part of you that suspects you have not changed. It is the standard How Marks Work applies everywhere: what can you point to?
How to cite yourself
Treat your earlier entries the way an essay treats sources:
- Date it — “In my entry from the third week…” — the distance matters.
- Quote a phrase, not a page. Your words from the time carry more truth than your summary of them now. “Mine still worked though. I keep thinking about that”, from Your First Entry, says more than “I was curious about loops.”
- Then show the now. A recent moment, just as specific, that the earlier self could not have managed — or would not have noticed.
Growth is not always writing bigger programs
Some growth is a new noticing: reading a classmate’s code in Spot the Bug and seeing the off-by-one, predicting a crash before the run confirms it. New noticing is growth, and your early entries prove it was not always there.
Curriculum connection
A1.1
apply computational thinking concepts and practices when planning and designing computational artifacts
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A3.3
investigate various career options related to digital technology and programming, and ways to continue their learning in these areas
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