Your Dev Journal is collected once in each unit. Before you hand it in, run this check. The coverage boxes are for you — a way of finding the gaps before they surprise you; the quality and growth boxes are the lens I actually read with, so anything you catch there is something we never need to have a conversation about. Ten minutes with this list is usually worth more than one extra entry.
The check
Coverage
- Every period that ended with “log it” has its entry, written then and there — including any since the last collection, because those are the ones this collection is read on
- Nothing was reconstructed the night before collection — reconstructed entries always show
- All four prompts appear across the unit: what I built, what broke, what I learned, what I would try next
- At least one entry includes a real artifact — a pasted error message, a code fragment, or a screenshot from the day
Quality
- Every bug is located, not just felt — “line 6 crashes on empty input”, not “my program was being weird” (see What a Strong Entry Looks Like)
- At least one entry records something that genuinely broke or confused me, not just victories
- My own part is named, not hidden inside “we” — what I typed, suggested, spotted, or misread
- Help is credited where it happened — a classmate, a forum, an AI assistant — the way Our Classroom Norms asks
Growth
- Each entry ends with one concrete “what I would try next”
- At least one earlier “try next” item shows up later as a thing I actually tried — with a sentence about how it went
The last two boxes are the whole game
Anyone can write “I will read error messages more carefully.” The journal becomes evidence of growth the day a later entry says “I read the whole traceback before touching anything, and it named the exact line” — a loop from intention to attempt to result. That loop is exactly what Showing Growth will ask you to point at, so leave yourself things to point at.
Curriculum connection
C2.6
interpret program errors and implement strategies to resolve them
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