In an "Introduction to Programming" course dedicated to first-year students, many students tend to procrastinate and do not autonomously process step by step new topics taught over time. In response to that trend, a tool (called Café) was implemented to supervise a remote activity spread over the semester, by instantaneously correcting students' exercises and providing feedback to guide them in refining their solutions. This paper presents and discusses the current impact of the system on students' learning, based on six years of activity. The results validate the high potential of such a tool, but also highlight many students do not take advantage of that opportunity to boost their learning. That opens doors to some significant upgrades in the tool, mainly consisting in offering a closer guidance to students through a larger range of regular activities. While Café was initially standing as an isolated tool offering correction and feedbacks, this paper advocates for Café becoming an integral part of the course, leading to a consistent synergy between in-person and continuous remote learning.

In order to boost students’ motivation in practicing their problem-solving skills and give them opportunities to get feedback, we broke our CS1 course routine with a disruptive cross-skilling activity. It relies on collaboration between teams of students where peer feedback (using rubric) stands as the cornerstone to design and build a solution responding to a given problem.This paper aims at formally assessing the peer feedback process across three activity sessions. It also highlights the different success factors supporting peer feedback in that context through a cause and effect diagram. We show that peer feedback fosters primary problem-solving foundations. We also discuss its limitations, namely due to an insufficient granularity in the provided checklist as well as a lack of transversal skills from students, making them less comfortable with peer feedback. Although, by repeating the activity, students could manage it better and better and take more advantage of peer feedback.

This paper focuses on a programming methodology relying on an informal and graphical version of the Loop Invariant for building the code. This methodology is applied in the context of a CS1 course in which students are exposed to several C programming language concepts and algorithmic aspects. The key point in the course is thus to imagine a problem resolution strategy (the Graphical Loop Invariant) prior to writing the code (that becomes, then, reasonably easy once relying on the Graphical Loop Invariant). This paper exposes the rules for building a sound and accurate Graphical Loop Invariant as well as the programming methodology. As such, our programming methodology might be seen as a first step towards considering formal methods in programming courses without making any assumption on students mathematical background as it does not require to manipulate any mathematical notations. The paper also introduces an integrated learning tool we developed for supporting the Graphical Loop Invariant teaching and practice. Finally, the paper gives preliminary insight into how students seize the methodology and use the learning tools for supporting their learning phase.

Shaping students’ mind to structure and solve problem, in an Introduction to Programming course for first year students, takes time, leading some students to get demotivated before they actually master this new skill. This paper reports on a Collaborative Design and Build activity dedicated to reinforce students’ interest and improve their skills by sequentially solving problems in teams, through a real-life inspired scenario. Two sessions of the activity were organized during the semester. This paper carefully describes the activity design. It also presents and discusses results showing that students’ productions got more accurate across the sessions, leading many participants to outperform in solving problems in the final exam.