Automatic Formative and Motivational Feedback Personalized for Introductory Programming Course

The teaching and learning of the first programming language course, commonly called CS1 (Computer Science 1), is a reported challenge for undergraduate students in different majors and universities. In general, these courses have a high failure rate at institutions around the world. At the same time, there has been an increase in the usage of automated feedback tools for programming language courses. These tools present feedback to help the students know if their code is correct or incorrect while studying. This automatic feedback is important for student learning. In this context, this paper presents the AsPin plugin, developed for the virtual learning environment, which uses the student's profile to provide feedback (messages and advice) to personalize their learning. The automatic feedback helps the student understand where they made mistakes, delivers motivational messages so that the student continues to learn, and points to further academic materials so that the student spends more time studying what they need. This feedback is also personalized for the student's profile, as at the beginning of the course, the student fills out a form with basic information, for example, whether or not they already have programming experience and their major. The plugin was developed for the Moodle platform, a free and open-source virtual learning environment with CodeRunner, an automated grader for multi-programming languages. The AsPin plugin was developed for the CS1 course in Python language by students and instructors from the Department of Computer Science at the University of Brasilia. The plugin presented in this paper was evaluated by undergraduate students taking different majors, which has a high student acceptance rate. This paper presents the applied methodology, the development of the plugin, as well the performance evaluations and perceptions of students from the University of Brasilia in two academic semesters in 2022.