Every year, millions of students learn how to write programs. Learning activities for beginners almost always include programming tasks that require a student to write a program to solve a particular problem. When learning how to solve such a task, many students need feedback on their previous actions, and hints on how to proceed. For tasks such as programming, which are most often solved stepwise, the feedback should take the steps a student has taken towards implementing a solution into account, and the hints should help a student to complete or improve a possibly partial solution.This paper investigates how previous research on feedback is translated to when and how to give feedback and hints on steps a student takes when solving a programming task. We have selected datasets consisting of sequences of steps students take when working on a programming problem, and annotated these datasets at those places at which experts would intervene, and how they would intervene. We have used these datasets to compare expert feedback * co-leader †