Assessing CS1 Java Skills: A Three-Year Experience

We describe the approach that has been followed by the authors while teaching the CS1 laboratory course on Java programming at the University of Florence. In particular, we focus on the assessment method that has been utilized: by making use of specific software developed by the teachers themselves, the method allowed them to automatically obtain a preliminary evaluation of the students' performance, which could subsequently be analyzed and modified after a manual exploration of the students' work