CAFE: Automatic Correction and Feedback of Programming Challenges for a CS1 Course

peer reviewedThis paper introduces CAFE (``Correction Automatique et Feedback des Etudiants''), an on-line platform designed to assess and deliver automatic feedback and feedforward information to CS1 students, both on process and products of series of programming exercises, targeting especially an informal Loop Invariant for building the code. The paper reports on the first trials of CAFE with a group of 80 students. Results show that CAFE is used, usable, and appreciated by students